surprise me that my
will was such a cripple against the sensibilities of that delicate
creature. I was a man of as much will as was naturally good for me;
and my training had made it abnormal like a prize-fighter's bicepital
muscle. People of my profession need some counter-irritant, which they
seldom get, to the habit of command. To be the ultimate control for a
_clientele_ of a thousand people, to enforce the personal opinion in
every matter from a broken constitution to a broken heart, deprives a
man of the usual human challenges to an athletic will. In his case, if
ever, motion follows least resistance. His will-power grows by a
species of pommelling; not by the higher tactics of wrestling.

But I, who gave the fiat on which life or death hung poised as
unhesitatingly as I controlled the fluctuations of an influenza; and I,
to whom the pliability of the feminine will had long since become an
accepted and somewhat elemental fact, like the nature of milk-toast; I,
Dr. Thorne, who had the habit of success, who expected to make his
point, who was accustomed to receive obedience, who fought death or
hysteria, an opposing school or a tricky patient, with equal fidelity,
as one who pursues the avocation of life,--I stood, conquered before
this slender woman whose eyes, like the sword of flame, turned this way
and that, guarding the barred gates of the only Eden I had ever chosen
to enter.

In short, for the first time in my life I found myself a suppliant; and
I found myself thus and there for the sake of a feeling.

It was not for science' sake, it was not for the sake of personal fame,
or for the glory of an idea, or for the promulgation of a discovery. I
had not been overcome upon the intellectual side of my nature. I had
been conquered by an emotion. I had been beaten by a thing for which,
all my life, I had been prescribing as confidently as I would for a
sprain. Medical men will understand me, and some others may, when I
say that I experienced surprise to come face to face at last, and in
this unanswerable personal way, with an invisible, intangible power of
the soul and of the body, which could not be treated as "a symptom."

I loved her. That was enough, and beyond. I loved her. That was the
beginning and end. I loved her. I found nothing in the Materia Medica
that could cure the fact. I loved her. Science gave me no explanation
of the phenomenon. I did not love her scientifically. I loved her