-morrow, doctor,' she said, 'I happen
to know. I'd rather not argue about it. I'm tired. I need a change.
I've had no vacation this year. And that woman would be better off in
a hospital, anyway.'

"I was cross, and I kept my patient in her own house. I thought she
wasn't fit to move.

"'I believe I'm going mad!' she used to tell me, with that glitter in
the eye--gives the effect of a rearing horse--perfectly symptomatic.
'I tell you I'm not responsible, doctor, for what I do! You must keep
me away from--people. But don't leave me alone--oh, don't leave me
alone! Why don't the women come to see me? Oh, I can't stay alone!'

"And so on, and so on. It poured out in the regular way--how the poor
things spend themselves!--and I listened to it all. They're perfectly
typical under those circumstances, but one phrase struck me:

"'I have fought-- Oh, I _have_ fought! It's killing me, but I have
fought!'

"She had, poor little woman. But what was she? When I realised ...
when I _knew_..."

They sat now in a circle of dark. The room was nearly empty; the rain
had grown to a torrent and lashed the windows furiously.

"Well, I couldn't help taking stock of the thing, and it looked odd,
anyway you looked at it. I remembered that the reason I got the house
in the first place was very much the same reason that had emptied it
twice. Of course the agent remembered it, too.

"'Where's those mathematics of yours, doctor?' he asked me with a
good-natured grin.

"'Stuff and nonsense!' I said to him. 'I'll get a tenant for that
house, myself.'

"You see, whether or not there was any sense in it, I couldn't let that
house get a bad name. There were neighbours and they will talk--they
don't always know so much about mathematics as scientific men, you know!

"What a great thing it is, if one could get hold of it and use it--the
collective spirit of a community! It's utilizable--or ought to
be--like water power....

"There was a woman in town then, a 'mental healer,' she called herself.
I'd run across her more than once and she interested me very much. She
was a clever woman--sensible, too, which doesn't always follow, you
know. So far as I could tell, she never handled a case she wasn't able
to attend to, which may seem an odd thing for me to say, but happens to
be so. I know of a dozen nervous, hysterical women--emotional
spend-thrifts--that she bullied into shape and got so they could stand
up without