Chains

A friend of mine, a quite celebrated neurologist, psychiatrist, and interpreter of Freud, and myself were met one night to discuss a very much talked-of book of his, a book of clinical studies relative to various obsessions, perversions and inhibitions which had afflicted various people in their day and which he, as a specialist in these matters, had investigated and attempted to alleviate. To begin with, I should say that he had filled many difficult and responsible positions in hospitals, asylums, and later, as a professor of these matters, occupied a chair in one of our principal universities. He was kindly, thoughtful, and intensely curious as to the workings of this formula we call life, but without lending himself to any—at least to very few—hard and fast dogmas. More interesting still life appeared to interest but never to discourage him. He really liked it. Pain, he said, he accepted as an incentive, an urge to life. Strife he liked because it hardened all to strength. And he believed in action as the antidote to too much thought, the way out of brooding and sorrow. Youth passes, strength passes, life forms pass; but action makes all bearable and even enjoyable. Also he wanted more labor, not less, more toil, more exertion, for humanity. And he insisted that through, not round or outside, life lay the way to happiness, if there was a way. But with action all the while. So much for his personal point of view.

On the other hand he was always saying of me that I had a touch of the Hindu in me, the Far East, the Brahmin. I emphasized too much indifference to life—or, if not that, I quarreled too much with pain, unhappiness, and did not impress strongly enough the need of action. I was forever saying that the strain was too great, that there had best be less of action, less of pain.... As to the need of less pain, I agreed, but never to the need of less action; in verification of which I pointed to my own life, the changes I had deliberately courted, the various activities I had entered upon, the results I had sought for. He was not to be routed from his contention entirely, nor I from mine.

Following this personal analysis we fell to discussing a third man, whom we both admired, an eminent physiologist, then connected with one of the great experimental laboratories of the world, who had made many deductions and discoveries in connection with the associative faculty of the brain and the mechanics of associative memory. This man was a mechanist, not an evolutionist, and of the most convinced type. To him nowhere in nature was there any serene and directive and thoughtful conception which brought about, and was still bringing about continually, all the marvels of structure and form and movement that so arrest and startle our intelligence at every turn. Nowhere any constructive or commanding force which had thought out, for instance, and brought to pass flowers, trees, animals, men—associative order and community life. On the contrary, the beauty of nature as well as the order of all living, such as it is, was an accident, and not even a necessary one, yet unescapable, a condition or link in an accidental chain. If you would believe him and his experiments, the greatest human beings that ever lived and the most perfect states of society that ever were have no more significance in nature than the most minute ephemera. The Macedonian Alexander is as much at the mercy of fate as the lowest infusoria. For every germ that shoots up into a tree thousands are either killed or stunted by unfavorable conditions; and although, beyond question, many of them—the most—bear within themselves the same power as the successful ones to be and to do, had they the opportunity, still they fail—a belief of my own in part, albeit a hard doctrine.

One would have thought, as I said to Professor Z—— at this meeting, that such a mental conviction would be dulling and destructive to initiative and force, and I asked him why he thought it had not operated to blunt and destroy this very great man. “For the very reasons I am always emphasizing,” he replied. “Pain, necessity, life stung him into action and profound thought, hence success. He is the person he is by reason of enforced mental and physical action.”

“But,” I argued, “his philosophy makes him account it all as worthless, or, if not that, so fleeting and unstable as to make it scarcely worth the doing, even though he does it. As he sees it, happiness and tribulation, glory and obscurity, are all an accident. Science, industry, politics, like races and planets, are accidents. Trivial conditions cause great characters and geniuses like himself to rest or to remain inactive, and mediocre ones are occasionally permitted to execute great deeds or frustrate them in the absence of the chance that might have produced a master. Circumstances are stronger than personalities, and the impotence of individuals is the tragedy of everyday life.”

“Quite so,” agreed my friend, “and there are times when I am inclined to agree with him, but at most times not. I used to keep hanging in one of my offices, printed and framed, that famous quotation from Ecclesiastes: ‘I returned, and saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.’ But I took it down because it was too discouraging. And yet,” he added after a time, because we both fell silent at this point, “although I still think it is true, as time has gone on and I have experimented with life and with people I have come to believe that there is something else in nature, some not as yet understood impulse, which seeks to arrange and right and balance things at times. I know that this sounds unduly optimistic and vainly cheerful, especially from me, and many—you, for one, will disagree—but I have sometimes encountered things in my work which have caused me to feel that nature isn’t altogether hard or cruel or careless, even though accidents appear to happen.”

“Accidents?” I said; “holocausts, you mean.” But he continued:

“Of course, I do not believe in absolute good or absolute evil, although I do believe in relative good and relative evil. Take tenderness and pity, in some of their results at least. Our friend Z——, on the contrary, sees all as accident, or blind chance and without much if any real or effective pity or amelioration, a state that I cannot reason myself into. Quite adversely, I think there is something that helps life along or out of its difficulties. I know that you will not agree with me; still, I believe it, and while I do not think there is any direct and immediate response, such as the Christian Scientists and the New Thought devotees would have us believe, I know there is a response at times, or at least I think there is, and I think I can prove it. Take dreams, for instance, which, as Freud has demonstrated, are nature’s way of permitting a man to sleep in the presence of some mental worry that would tend to keep him awake, or if he had fallen asleep, and stood in danger to wake him.”

I waived that as a point, but then he referred to medicine and surgery and all the mechanical developments as well as the ameliorative efforts of life, such as laws relating to child labor, workingmen’s compensation and hours, compulsory safety devices and the like, as specific proofs of a desire on the part of nature, working through man, to make life easier for man, a wish on her part to provide him, slowly and stumblingly, mayhap, with things helpful to him in his condition here. Without interrupting him, I allowed him to call to mind the Protestant Reformation, how it had ended once and for all the iniquities of the Inquisition; the rise of Christianity, and how, temporarily at least, it had modified if not entirely ended the brutalities of Paganism. Anesthetics, and how they had served to ameliorate pain. I could have pointed out that life itself was living on life and always had been, and that as yet no substitute for the flesh of helpless animals had been furnished man as food. (He could not hear my thoughts.) The automobile, he went on, had already practically eliminated the long sufferings of the horse; our anti-slavery rebellion and humane opposition in other countries had once and for all put an end to human slavery; also he called to mind the growth of humane societies of one kind and another, that ministered to many tortured animals. And humane laws were being constantly passed and enforced to better if not entirely cure inhuman conditions.

I confess I was interested, if not convinced. In spite of life itself existing on life, there was too much in what he said to permit any one to pass over it indifferently. But there came to my mind just the same all the many instances of crass accident and brutish mischance which are neither prevented nor cured by anything—the thousands who are annually killed in railroad accidents and industrial plants, despite protective mechanisms and fortifying laws compelling their use; the thousands who die yearly from epidemics of influenza, smallpox, yellow fever, cholera and widespread dissemination of cancer, consumption and related ills. These I mentioned. He admitted the force of the point but insisted that man, impelled by nature, not only for his own immediate protection but by reason of a sympathy aroused through pain endured by him, was moved to kindly action. Besides if nature loved brutality and inhumanity and suffering why should any atom of it wish to escape pain, and why in those atoms should it generate sympathy and tears and rejoicing at escape from suffering by man, why sorrow and horror at the accidental or intentional infliction of disaster on man by nature or man?

After a time, he volunteered: “Let me give you a concrete instance. It has always interested me and it seems to prove that there is something to what I say. It concerns a girl I know, a very homely one, who lost her mind. At the beginning of her mental trouble her father called me in to see what, if anything, could be done. The parents of this girl were Catholics. He was a successful contractor and politician, the father of three children; he provided very well for them materially but could do little for them mentally. He was not the intellectual but the religious type. The mother was a cheerful, good-natured and conventional woman, and had only the welfare of her children and her husband at heart. When I first came to know this family—I was a young medical man then—this girl was thirteen or fourteen, the youngest of the three children. Of these three children, and for that matter of the entire family, I saw that this girl was decidedly the most interesting psychically and emotionally. She was intense and receptive, but inclined to be morbid; and for a very good reason. She was not good-looking, not in any way attractive physically. Worse, she had too good a mind, too keen a perception, not to know how severe a deprivation that was likely to prove and to resent it. As I came to know through later investigations—all the little neglects and petty deprivations which, owing to her lack of looks and the exceeding and of course superior charms of her sister and brother, were throughout her infancy and youth thrust upon her. Her mouth was not sweet—too large; her eyes unsatisfactory as to setting, not as to wistfulness; her nose and chin were unfortunately large, and above her left eye was a birthmark, a livid scar as large as a penny. In addition her complexion was sallow and muddy, and she was not possessed of a truly graceful figure; far from it. After she had reached fifteen or sixteen, she walked, entirely by reason of mental depression, I am sure, with a slow and sagging and moody gait; something within, I suppose, always whispering to her that hope was useless, that there was no good in trying, that she had been mercilessly and irretrievably handicapped to begin with.

“On the other hand, as chance would have it, her sister and brother had been almost especially favored by nature. Celeste Ryan was bright, vivacious, colorful. She was possessed of a graceful body, a beautiful face, clear, large and blue eyes, light glossy hair, and a love for life. She could sing and dance. She was sought after and courted by all sorts of men and boys. I myself, as a young man, used to wish that I could interest her in myself, and often went to the house on her account. Her brother also was smart, well-favored, careful as to his clothes, vain, and interested in and fascinating to girls of a certain degree of mind. He and his sister liked to dance, to attend parties, to play and disport themselves wherever young people were gathered.

“And for the greater part of Marguerite’s youth, or until her sister and brother were married, this house was a centre for all the casual and playful goings-on of youth. Girls and boys, all interested in Celeste and her brother, came and went—girls to see the good-looking brother, boys to flirt with and dance attendance upon the really charming Celeste. In winter there was skating; in summer automobiling, trips to the beach, camping even. In most of these affairs, so long as it was humanly possible, the favorless sister was included; but, as we all know, especially where thoughtless and aggressive youth is concerned, such little courtesies are not always humanly possible. Youth will be served. In the main it is too intent upon the sorting and mating process, each for himself, to give the slightest heed or care for another. Væ Victis.

“To make matters worse, and possibly because her several deficiencies early acquainted her with the fact that all boys and girls found her sister and brother so much more attractive, Marguerite grew reticent and recessive—so much so that when I first saw her she was already slipping about with the air of one who appeared to feel that she was not as ingratiating and acceptable as she might be, even though, as I saw, her mother and father sought to make her feel that she was. Her father, a stodgy and silent man, too involved in the absurdities of politics and religion and the difficulties of his position to give very much attention to the intricacies and subtleties of his children’s personalities, never did guess the real pain that was Marguerite’s. He was a narrow and determined religionist, one who saw in religious abstention, a guarded and reserved life, the only keys to peace and salvation. In fact before he died an altar was built in his house and mass was read there for his especial spiritual benefit every morning. What he thought of the gayeties of his two eldest children at this time I do not know, but since these were harmless and in both cases led to happy and enduring marriages, he had nothing to quarrel with. As for his youngest child, I doubt if he ever sensed in any way the moods and torturous broodings that were hers, the horrors that attend the disappointed love life. He had not been disappointed in his love life, and was therefore not able to understand. He was not sensitive enough to have suffered greatly if he had been, I am sure. But his wife, a soft, pliable, affectionate, gracious woman, early sensed that her daughter must pay heavily for her looks, and in consequence sought in every way to woo her into an unruffled complacence with life and herself.

“But how little the arts of man can do toward making up for the niggardliness of nature! I am certain that always, from her earliest years, this ugly girl loved her considerate mother and was grateful to her; but she was a girl of insight, if not hard practical sense or fortitude, and loved life too much to be content with the love of her mother only. She realized all too keenly the crass, if accidental, injustice which had been done her by nature and was unhappy, terribly so. To be sure, she tried to interest herself in books, the theatre, going about with a homely girl or two like herself. But before her ever must have been the spectacle of the happiness of others, their dreams and their fulfilments. Indeed, for the greater part of these years, and for several years after, until both her sister and brother had married and gone away, she was very much alone, and, as I reasoned it out afterwards, imagining and dreaming about all the things she would like to be and do. But without any power to compel them. Finally she took to reading persistently, to attending theatres, lectures and what not—to establish some contact, I presume, with the gay life scenes she saw about her. But I fancy that these were not of much help, for life may not be lived by proxy. And besides, her father, if not her mother, resented a too liberal thought life. He believed that his faith and its teachings were the only proper solution to life.

“One of the things that interested me in connection with this case—and this I gathered as chief medical counsel of the family between Marguerite’s fifteenth and twenty-fifth year—was that because of the lack of beauty that so tortured her in her youth she had come to take refuge in books, and then, because of these, the facts which they revealed in regard to a mere worthwhile life than she could have, to draw away from all religion as worthless, or at least not very important as a relief from pain. And yet there must have been many things in these books which tortured her quite as much as reality, for she selected, as her father once told me afterward—not her mother, who could read little or nothing—only such books as she should not read; books, I presume, that painted life as she wished it to be for herself. They were by Anatole France, George Moore, de Maupassant and Dostoyevsky. Also she went to plays her father disapproved of and brooded in libraries. And she followed, as she herself explained to me, one lecturer and another, one personality and another, more, I am sure, because by this method she hoped to contact, although she never seemed to, men who were interesting to her, than because she was interested in the things they themselves set forth.

“In connection with all this I can tell you of only one love incident which befell her. Somewhere around the time when she was twenty-one or -two she came in contact with a young teacher, himself not very attractive or promising and whose prospects, as her father saw them, were not very much. But since she was not pretty and rather lonely and he seemed to find companionship, and mayhap solace in her, no great objection was made to him. In fact as time went on, and she and the teacher became more and more intimate, both she and her parents assumed that in the course of time they would most certainly marry. For instance, at the end of his school-teaching year here in New York, and although he left the city he kept up a long correspondence with her. In addition, he spent at least some of his vacation near New York, at times returning and going about with her and seeming to feel that she was of some value to him in some way.

“How much of this was due to the fact that she was provided with spending money of her own and could take him here and there, to places to which he could not possibly have afforded to go alone I cannot say. None the less, it was assumed, because of their companionship and the fact that she would have some money of her own after marriage, that he would propose. But he did not. Instead, he came year after year, visited about with her, took up her time, as the family saw it (her worthless time!), and then departed for his duties elsewhere as free as when he had come. Finally this having irritated if not infuriated the several members of her family, they took her to task about it, saying that she was a fool for trifling with him. But she, although perhaps depressed by all this, was still not willing to give him up; he was her one hope. Her explanation to the family was that because he was poor he was too proud to marry until he had established himself. Thus several more years came and went, and he returned or wrote, but still he did not propose. And then of a sudden he stopped writing entirely for a time, and still later on wrote that he had fallen in love and was about to be married.

“This blow appeared to be the crowning one in her life. For in the face of the opposition, and to a certain degree contempt, of her father, who was a practical and fairly successful man, she had devoted herself to this man who was neither successful nor very attractive for almost seven years. And then after so long a period, in which apparently he had used her to make life a little easier for himself, even he had walked away and left her for another. She fell to brooding more and more to herself, reading not so much now, as I personally know, as just thinking. She walked a great deal, as her father told me, and then later began to interest herself, or so she pretended, in a course of history and philosophy at one of the great universities of the city. But as suddenly, thereafter, she appeared to swing between exaggerated periods of study or play or lecture-listening and a form of recessive despair, under the influence of which she retired to her room and stayed there for days, wishing neither to see nor hear from any one—not even to eat. On the other hand again, she turned abruptly to shopping, dressmaking and the niceties which concerned her personal appearance; although even in this latter phase there were times when she did nothing at all, seemed to relax toward her old listlessness and sense of inconsequence and remained in her room to brood.

“About this time, as I was told afterwards, her mother died and, her sister and brother having married, she was left in charge of the house and of her father. It was soon evident that she had no particular qualifications for or interest in housekeeping, and a maiden sister of her father came to look after things. This did not necessarily darken the scene, but it did not seem to lighten it any. She liked this aunt well enough, although they had very little in common mentally. Marguerite went on as before. Parallel with all this, however, had run certain things which I have forgotten to mention. Her father had been growing more and more narrowly religious. As a matter of fact he had never had any sympathy for the shrewd mental development toward which her lack of beauty had driven her. Before she was twenty-three as I have already explained, her father had noted that she was indifferent to her church duties. She had to be urged to go to mass on Sunday, to confession and communion once a month. Also as he told me afterward, as something to be deplored, her reading had caused her to believe that her faith was by no means infallible, its ritual important; there were bigger and more interesting things in life. This had caused her father not only to mistrust but to detest the character of her reading, as well as her tendencies in general. From having some sympathy with her at first, as did her mother always, as the ugly duckling of the family, he had come to have a cold and stand-offish feeling. She was, as he saw it, an unnatural child. She did not obey him in respect to religion. He began, as I have hinted, to look into her books, those in the English tongue at least, and from a casual inspection came to feel that they were not fit books for any one to read. They were irreligious, immoral. They pictured life as it actually was, scenes and needs and gayeties and conflicts, which, whether they existed or not, were not supposed to exist; and most certainly they were not to be introduced into his home, her own starved disposition to the contrary notwithstanding. They conflicted with the natural chill and peace of his religion and temperament. He forbade her to read such stuff, to bring such books into his home. When he found some of them later he burned them. He also began to urge the claims of his religion more and more upon her.

“Reduced by this calamity and her financial dependence, which had always remained complete, she hid her books away and read them only outside or in the privacy of her locked room—but she read them. The subsequent discovery by him that she was still doing this, and his rage, caused her to think of leaving home. But she was without training, without any place to go, really. If she should go she would have to prepare herself for it by teaching, perhaps, and this she now decided to take up.

“About this time she began to develop those characteristics or aberrations which brought me into the case. As I have said, she began to manifest a most exaggerated and extraordinary interest in her facial appearance and physical well-being, an interest not at all borne out rationally by her looks. Much to her father’s and his sister’s astonishment, she began to paint and primp in front of her mirror nearly all day long. Lip sticks, rouge, eyebrow pencils, perfumes, rings, pins, combs, and what not else, were suddenly introduced—very expensive and disconcerting lingerie, for one thing.

“The family had always maintained a charge account at at least two of the larger stores of the city, and to these she had recently repaired, as it was discovered afterwards, and indulged herself, without a by-your-leave, in all these things. High-heeled slippers, bright-colored silk stockings, hats, blouses, gloves, furs, to say nothing of accentuated and even shocking street costumes, began to arrive in bundles. Since the father was out most of the day and the elderly aunt busy with household affairs, nothing much of all this was noted, until later she began to adorn herself in this finery and to walk the streets in it. And then the due bills, sixty days late; most disturbing but not to be avoided. And so came the storm.

“The father and aunt, who had been wondering where these things were coming from, became very active and opposed. For previous to this, especially in the period of her greatest depression, Marguerite had apparently dressed with no thought of anything, save a kind of resigned willingness to remain inconspicuous, as much as to say: ‘What difference does it make. No one is interested in me.’ Now, however, all this had gone—quite. She had supplied herself with hats so wide and ‘fancy’ or ‘fixy,’ as her father said, that they were a disgrace. And clothing so noticeable or ‘loud’—I forget his exact word—that any one anywhere would be ashamed of her. There were, as I myself saw when I was eventually called in as specialist in the case, too many flowers, too much lace, too many rings, pins and belts and gewgaws connected with all this, which neither he nor his sister was ever quite able to persuade her to lay aside. And the colors! Unless she were almost forcibly restrained, these were likely to be terrifying, even laughter-provoking, especially to those accustomed to think of unobtrusiveness as the first criterion of taste—a green or red or light blue broad-trimmed hat, for instance, with no such color of costume to harmonize with it. And, whether it became her or not, a white or tan or green dress in summertime, or one with too much red or too many bright colors in winter. And very tight, worn with a dashing manner, mayhap. Even high-heeled slippers and thin lacy dresses in bitter windy weather. And the perfumes with which she saturated herself were, as her father said, impossible—of a high rate of velocity, I presume.

“So arrayed, then, she would go forth, whenever she could contrive it, to attend a theatre, a lecture, a moving picture, or to walk the streets. And yet, strangely enough, and this was as curious a phase of the case as any, she never appeared to wish to thrust her personal charms, such as they were, on any one. On the contrary, as it developed, there had generated in her the sudden hallucination that she possessed so powerful and self-troubling a fascination for men that she was in danger of bewildering them, enticing them against themselves to their moral destruction, as well as bringing untold annoyance upon herself. A single glance, one look at her lovely face, and presto! they were enslaved. She needed but to walk, and lo! beauty—her beauty, dazzling, searing, destroying—was implied by every motion, gesture. No man, be he what he might, could withstand it. He turned, he stared, he dreamed, he followed her and sought to force his attention on her. Her father explained to me that when he met her on the street one day he was shocked to the point of collapse. A daughter of his so dressed, and on the street! With the assistance of the maiden sister a number of modifications was at once brought about. All charge accounts were cancelled. Dealers were informed that no purchases of hers would be honored unless with the previous consent of her father. The worst of her sartorial offenses were unobtrusively removed from her room and burnt or given away, and plainer and more becoming things substituted.

“But now, suddenly, there developed a new and equally interesting stage of the case. Debarred from dressing as she would, she began to imagine, as these two discovered, that she was being followed and admired and addressed and annoyed by men, and that at her very door. Eager and dangerous admirers lurked about the place. As the maiden aunt once informed me, having wormed her way into Marguerite’s confidence, she had been told that men ‘were wild’ about her and that go where she would, and conduct herself however modestly and inconspicuously, still they were inflamed.

“A little later both father and sister began to notice that on leaving the house or returning to it she would invariably pause, if going out, to look about first; if returning, to look back as though she were expecting to see some one outside whom she either did or did not wish to see. Not infrequently her comings-in were accompanied by something like flight, so great a need to escape some presumably dangerous or at least impetuous pursuer as to cause astonishment and even fear for her. There would be a feverish, fumbled insertion of the key from without, after which she would fairly jump in, at the same time looking back with a nervous, perturbed glance. Once in she would almost invariably pause and look back as though, having succeeded in eluding her pursuer, she was still interested to see what he was like or what he was doing, often going to the curtained windows of the front room to peer out. And to her then confidante, this same aunt, she explained on several occasions that she had ‘just been followed again’ all the way from Broadway or Central Park West or somewhere, sometimes by a most wonderful-looking gentleman, sometimes by a most loathsome brute. He had seen her somewhere and had pursued her to her very room. Yet, brute or gentleman, she was always interested to look back.

“When her father and aunt first noted this manifestation they had troubled to inquire into it, looking into the street or even going so far as to go to the door and look for the man, but there was no one, or perchance some passing pedestrian or neighbor who most certainly did not answer to the description of either handsome gentleman or brute. Then sensibly they began to gather that this was an illusion. But by now the thing had reached a stage where they began to feel genuine alarm. Guests of the family were accused by her of attempting to flirt with her, of making appealing remarks to her as they entered, and neighbors of known polarity and conventional rigidity of presuming to waylay her and forcing her to listen to their pleas. Thus her father and aunt became convinced that it was no longer safe for her to be at large. The family’s reputation was at stake; its record for freedom from insanity about to be questioned.

“In due time, therefore, I was sent for, and regardless of how much they dreaded a confession of hallucination here the confession was made to me. I was asked to say what if anything could be done for her, and if nothing, what was to be done with her. After that I was permitted to talk to Marguerite whom of course I had long known, but not as a specialist or as one called in for advice. Rather, I was presented to her as visiting again as of yore, having dropped in after a considerable absence. She seemed pleased to see me, only as I noticed on this, as on all subsequent occasions, she seemed to wish, first, not to stay long in my presence and more interesting still, as I soon noted, to wish to keep her face, and even her profile, averted from me, most especially her eyes and her glances. Anywhere, everywhere, save at me she looked, and always with the purpose, as I could see, of averting her glances.

“After she had left the room I found that this development was new to the family. They had not noticed it before, and then it struck me as odd. I suspected at once that there was some connections between this and her disappointed love life. The devastating effect of lack of success in love in youth had been too much for her. So this averted glance appeared to me to have something to do with that. Fearing to disturb or frighten her, and so alienate her, I chose to say nothing but instead came again and again in order to familiarize her with my presence, to cause her once more to take it as a matter of course. And to enlist her interest and sympathy, I pretended that there was a matter of taxes and some involved property that her father was helping me to solve.

“And in order to insure her presence I came as a rule just before dinner, staying some little time and talking with her. To guarantee being alone with her I had her father and his sister remain out for a few minutes after I arrived, so as to permit me to seem to wait. And on these occasions I invented all sorts of excuses for coming into conversation with her. On all of these visits I noticed that she still kept her face from me. Having discussed various things with her, I finally observed: ‘I notice, Marguerite, that whenever I come here now you never look at me. Don’t you like me? You used to look at me, and now you keep your face turned away. Why is that?’

“‘Oh, of course I like you, doctor, of course,’ she replied, ‘only,’ she paused, ‘well, I’ll tell you how it is: I don’t want to have the same effect on you that I do on other men.’”

“She paused and I stared, much interested. ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite understand, Marguerite,’ I said.

“‘Well, you see, it’s this way,’ she went on, ‘it’s my beauty. All you men are alike you see: you can’t stand it. You would be just the same as the rest. You would be wanting to flirt with me, too, and it wouldn’t be your fault, but mine. You can’t help it. I know that now. But I don’t want you to be following me like the rest of them, and you would be if I looked at you as I do at the others.’ She had on at the time a large hat, which evidently she had been trying on before I came, and now she pulled it most coquettishly low over her face and then sidled, laughingly, out of the room.

“When I saw and heard this,” he went on, “I was deeply moved instead of being amused as some might imagine, for I recognized that this was an instance of one of those kindly compensations in nature about which I have been talking, some deep inherent wish on the part of some overruling Providence perhaps to make life more reasonably endurable for all of us. Here was this girl, sensitive and seeking, who had been denied everything—or, rather, the one thing she most craved in life; love. For years she had been compelled to sit by and see others have all the attention and pleasures, while she had nothing—no pleasures, no lovers. And because she had been denied them their import had been exaggerated by her; their color and splendor intensified. She had been crucified, after a fashion, until beauty and attention were all that her mind cried for. And then, behold the mercy of the forces about which we are talking! They diverted her mind in order to save her from herself. They appeared at last to preserve her from complete immolation, or so I see it. Life does not wish to crucify people, of that I am sure. It lives on itself—as we see,—is “red of beak and claw” as the phrase has it—and yet, in the deep, who knows there may be some satisfactory explanation for that too—who can tell? At any rate, as I see it basically, fundamentally, it is well-intentioned. Useless, pointless torture had no real place in it; or at least so I think.” He paused and stared, as though he had clinched his argument.

“Just the same, as you say,” I insisted, “it does live on itself, the slaughter houses, the stockyards, the butcher shops, the germs that live and fatten as people die. If you can get much comfort out of these you are welcome.”

He paid no attention to me. Instead, he went on: “This is only a theory of mine, but we know, for instance, that there is no such thing as absolute evil, any more than there is absolute good. There is only relative evil and relative good. What is good for or to me may be evil to you, and vice versa, like a man who may be evil to you and good to me.

“In the case of this girl I cannot believe that so vast a thing as life, involving as it does, all the enormous forces and complexities, would single out one little mite such as she deliberately and specially for torture. On the contrary, I have faith to believe that the thing is too wise and grand for that. But, according to my theory, the machinery for creating things may not always run true. A spinner of plans or fabrics wishes them to come forth perfect of course, arranges a design and gathers all the colors and threads for a flawless result. The machine may be well oiled. The engine perfectly geared. Every precaution taken, and yet in the spinning here and there a thread will snap, the strands become entangled, bits, sometimes whole segments spoiled by one accident and another, but not intentionally. On the other hand, there are these flaws, which come from where I know not, of course, but are accidental, I am sure, not intended by the spinner. At least I think so. They cause great pain. They cause the worst disasters. Yet our great mother, Nature, the greatest spinner of all, does what she can to right things—or so I wish to believe. Like the spinner himself, she stops the machine, unites the broken strands, uses all her ability to make things run smoothly once more. It is my wish to believe that in this case, where a homely girl could not be made into a beautiful one and youth could not be substituted for maturity, still nature brought about what I look upon as a beneficent illusion, a providential hallucination. Via insanity, Marguerite attained to all the lovely things she had ever longed for. In her unreason she had her beautiful face, her adoring cavaliers—they turned and followed her in the streets. She was beautiful to all, to herself, and must hide her loveliness in order to avert pain and disaster to others. How would you explain that? As reasoned and malicious cruelty on the part of nature. Or as a kindly intervention, a change of heart, a wish on the part of nature or something to make amends to her for all that she suffered, not to treat her or any of us too brutally or too unfairly? Or just accident? How?”

He paused once more and gazed at me, as much as to say: “Explain that, if you can.” I, in turn, stared, lost for the time being in thoughts of this girl, for I was greatly impressed. This picture of her, trying, in her deranged imaginings as to her beauty, to protect others from herself, turning her face away from those who might suffer because of her indifference, because she in her day had suffered from the indifference of others, finding in hallucination, in her jumbled fancies, the fulfilment of all her hopes, her dreams, was too sad. I was too sad. I could not judge, and did not. Truly, truly, I thought, I wish I might believe.