uropean academies in a
month. But study colds, indigestion and insomnia, and change a thousand
lives a year from despair to felicity, and no authority will take the
slightest notice of you ... As with physical, so with mental
diseases--or spiritual, if you like to call them so. You don't suspect
that in the common mental diseases I'm a regular benefactor of mankind;
but I am. I don't blame you for not knowing it, because you're about the
last person I should have thought susceptible to any mental disease, and
so you've had no chance of finding out. Now, what is it?"

"Don't I tell you I'm suffering from horrible complications?" cried Mr.
Prohack.

"What kind of complications?"

"Every kind. My aim has always been to keep my life simple, and I
succeeded very well--perhaps too well--until I inherited money. I don't
mind money, but I do mind complications. I don't want a large
house--because it means complications. I desire Sissie's happiness, but
I hate weddings. I desire to be looked after, but I hate strange
servants. I can find pleasure in a motor-car, but I hate even the risk
of accidents. I have no objection to an income, but I hate investments.
And so on. All I ask is to live simply and sensibly, but instead of that
my existence is transformed into a quadratic equation. And I can't stop
it. My happiness is not increasing--it's decreasing. I spend more and
more time in wondering whither I am going, what I am after, and where
precisely is the point of being alive at all. That's a fact, and now you
know it."

Dr. Veiga rose from his chair and deliberately sat down on the side of
his patient's bed. The gesture in itself was sufficiently
unprofessional, but he capped it with another of which probably no
doctor had ever been guilty in a British sick-room before; he pulled out
a pocket-knife and became his own manicure, surveying his somewhat
neglected hands with a benevolently critical gaze, smiling at them as if
to say: "What funny hands you are!"

And Mr. Prohack felt that the doctor was saying: "What a funny Prohack
you are!"

"My friend," said Dr. Veiga at length (with his voice), "my friend, I
will not conceal from you that your alarm was justified. You are
suffering from one of the commonest and one of the gravest mental
derangements. I'm surprised, but there it is. You haven't yet discovered
that it's the earth you're living on. You fancy it may be Sirius,
Uranus, Aldebaran or Jupiter--let us say Jupiter. P