In the mood of reaction that the neurasthenic must meet, the trough of the wave, Isabelle doubted. Potts had not yet found the key to her mechanism; the old listless cloud befogged her still. After a sleepless night she would sit by her window, high up in the mountain of stone, and look out over the city, its voice dull at this hour of dawn,—a dozing monster. Something like terror filled her at these times, fear of herself, of the slumbering monster, so soon to wake and roar. "Act, do!" thundered Potts; "don't think! Live and get what you want…." Was that all? The peaceful pastures at Grafton, the still September afternoon when the Colonel died, the old man himself,—there was something in them beyond mere energy, quite outside the Potts philosophy.
Once she ventured to suggest this doubt to Cornelia Woodyard, who, being temporarily in need of a bracer, had resorted to "old Pot." She had planned to go to the opera that night and wanted to "be herself."
"I wonder if he's right about it all," said Isabelle; "if we are just machines, with a need to be oiled now and then,—to take this drug or that? Is it all as simple as he makes out? All just autointoxication, chemistry, and delusion?"
"You're ill,—that's why you doubt," Conny replied with tranquil positiveness. "When you've got the poison out of your system, you'll see, or rather you won't see crooked,—won't have ideas."
"It's all a formula?"
Conny nodded, shutting her large mouth firmly.
"And he has the key. You are merely an organ, and he pulls out this stop or that; gives you one thing to take and then another. You tell him this dotty idea you've got in your head and he'll pull the right stop to shake it out."
"I wonder! Some days I feel that I must go away by myself, get out of all the noise, and live up among the mountains far off—"
She stopped. For Conny was not one to whom to confide a longing for the stars and the winds in the pines and the scent of the earth. Such vaporing would be merely another symptom!
"What would you go mooning off by yourself for? You'd be crazy, for a fact.
Better come down to Palm Beach with me next month."