This guileless confidence affected me painfully.
"But I want to discover the secret of a great doctor's success," she pursued. "What is your charm? There is something mesmeric about you, I think, something inimical to disease at all events. There is healing in your touch, and your very manners make an impression which cures."
"Knowledge, I suppose, has nothing to do with it?" I suggested, smiling.
"No, nothing," she answered emphatically. "I have carried out directions of yours successfully which had been previously given to me by another doctor and tried by me without effect. You alter the attitude of one's mind somehow—that is how you do it, I believe."
"Well, I hope to alter the present attitude of your mind completely," I answered. "And to resume. I want you to tell me how you feel when one of those tormenting thoughts has passed. Do you suffer remorse for having entertained it?"
"Only an occasional pang," she said. "I do not allow myself to sorrow or suffer for thoughts which I cannot control. I am suffering from a morbid state of mind, and it is my duty to fight against the impulses which it engenders. But my responsibility begins and ends with the struggle. And I am quite sure that it is wiser to try and forget that such ideas ever were than to encourage them to haunt me by recollecting them even for purposes of penitential remorse."
"And when it is not a criminal impulse, that affects you—-"
"Criminal!" she ejaculated, aghast at the word.
I had used it on purpose to see its effect upon her, and was satisfied.
The moral consciousness was still intact.
"Yes," I persisted. "But when it is not an impulse of that kind, what is it that disturbs your mind?"