"She didn't look and act like it. And where did she get that sailor talk? It wasn't in the book she was reading."
"The book suggested the train of thought, nevertheless. The subconscious memory is absolute. She read those words at some time in her life, or heard them spoken—possibly in infancy."
"Well, it's too much for me. Can you take charge of her case?"
"No—although there is not, perhaps, a man in town more studied in this subject than myself. But there is no one more unfit to operate. I am too subjective, as the phrase is—too good a subject, easily hypnotized, and thus unable to control even a self-hypnotized person. As there is not a professional hypnotist in town it devolves upon you."
"But I know nothing about it."
"Learn. Your natural mastery over her renders you the one above all others to treat her successfully. Let her stare at the knife again—or any bright object. Lead back into her past, and try to find what was on her mind when she first walked in her sleep; then tell her that her fears or anxiety were groundless, and that she must never get up in her sleep again."
He gave Beverton as much of practical instruction as was safe for a novice to possess, and with some misgivings the half-credulous young husband resolved to experiment alone. But in his first attempt to do so, he found unexpected developments in the situation that seemed to remove the solution farther yet from his powers.
Not daring to take her into his confidence, he waited, evening after evening, for her to place herself under favoring conditions—to take up the wearying tale of the sea, and to rest her eyes and brain by staring at the glistening array of steel on the wall. She capriciously and vivaciously declared that she would have nothing more to do with either, that she would divert her mind by polishing up her neglected accomplishment of stenography (from practice of which he had rescued her by marriage), and while he fidgeted and made occasional more or less adroit references to the story, which he pretended to admire, she translated into hieroglyphics the random thoughts of her brain.
"For if I make a widow of myself some night," she said, "and an angel of you, Tommie, and escape execution, I will need to earn my living, don't you see? But if you like that horrid story, suppose you read to me from where I left off, and I'll take it down for practice."
He had committed himself, and was bound to the task. He began at the top of the page and read, but she mercifully stopped him part way to the bottom, so that she might transcribe her notes and verify. This measured her interest in the story, and as he had none himself he gladly ceased, and she began her transcription. While waiting for her he glanced at the ornament on the wall. It was bright, pleasing to the eye—artistic in finish and design. It attracted his gaze, and having secured it, held it; for the longer he looked the less inclined he felt to look elsewhere, and at last, with the knife filling his vision to the exclusion of the fork and steel, his eyelids drooped and his senses left him.