Things

								

cause?”
“Isn’t it suggestive that practically every one with whom you come in
contact----”
“My husband,” she retorted, quoting an instance against him.
“Your husband has great natural calm, and spends eight hours a day out
of the house. You have made this home, this really wonderful home, for
those you love. No one admires the achievement more than I do. But you
have sacrificed too much of yourself in doing it; and I’m not speaking
of your physical strength. In this library, in which you are so fond of
sitting, how many books have you ever read?”
“I was a great reader as a girl,” she answered.
“Which of these have you read in the last ten years?”
She murmured that he perhaps hardly understood the demands upon her
time.
“You never read. You can’t,” he returned. “Since my first hour here I
have been watching you, not your daughter. Her case is simple enough.
You don’t read, Mrs. Royce, not because you have no time, but because
you have no concentration. This is one of the many sacrifices you have
made to your household--a serious one, and we must face the results. I
have watched you each day carrying the morning papers about with you
until evening, and then, if you read the headlines, it is as much as
you can accomplish.”
She had been staring at him as though in a trance, but now she came
to, with a laugh.
“My dear Dr. Despard,” she said, “if you were the mother of four
children and the head----”
He held up his hand. “You must let me finish,” he said. “You have made
this home, and you administer it with consummate ability; and yet no
one is really happy in it, least of all yourself. Why? Well, I need not
remind you that no one is made happy merely by things. Some continuity
of inner life is absolutely necessary, not only to happiness but to
health. Remember, I am speaking as a nerve specialist. You, Mrs. Royce,
are an enemy to continuity. You dispel concentration as a rock dispels
a wave. Even I find no little difficulty, when in your presence, in
pursuing a consecutive train of thought, and, as for you yourself,
such a thing has long been impossible for you. Even now, on this
matter so immensely important to you, you have not been able to give
me your undivided attention. Other facts have kept coming up in your
consciousness--that a bell rang somewhere; that the hearth has not been
swept up. Acutely aware as I am of your point of view, these breaks
in your attention have been breaks in mine, too; but I have been able
to overcome them, and follow my ideas to the end, because I have been
trained to do so, and, besides, I’ve been here only two days. In two
days more I would not answer for myself. I should begin to see things,
things, things, and to believe that all life was merely a question of
arrangements. Even your religion, Mrs. Royce, in which most people find
some continuity, is a question of things--of Sunday-schools and altar