led his bread
with both hands, his mind still intent on that one engrossing, acute
point. While thus he sat he heard a voice, as in a dream, say, "The very
doctor you read about. That's the second curious case he's got in a
month or so.... Oh yes--very clever; he treats them, I understand, in
the same sort of way as the famous Dr Charbon of Paris would.... I
should say so; quite as good, if not better than Charbon. I'd rather
have an English doctor any day than a French.... His name's in the
paper--_Lefevre_." Then the doctor woke to the fact that he was being
talked about. He perceived his admirers were sitting at a table a little
behind him, and he judged from what had been said that his fresh case
was already being made "copy" of in the evening papers. The flattering
comparison of himself with Dr Charbon had an oddly stimulating effect
upon him, notwithstanding that it had been uttered by he knew not
whom,--a mere _vox et praeterea nihil_. He disclaimed to himself the
truth of the comparison, but all the same he was encouraged to bend his
attention with his utmost force to the solution of his difficult
problem--what to do to rouse his patient?

He sat thus, amid the bustle and buzz of the restaurant, the coming and
going of waiters, completely abstracted, assailing his difficulty with
questions on this side and on that,--when suddenly out of the mists that
obscured it there rose upon his mental vision an idea, which appealed to
him as a solution of the whole, and, more than that, as a secret that
would revolutionise all the treatment of nervous weakness and
derangement. How came the idea? How do ideas ever come? As inspirations,
we say, or as revelations; and truly they come upon us with such amazing
and inspiriting freshness, that they may well be called either the one
or the other. But no great idea had ever yet an epiphany but from the
ferment of more familiar small ideas,--just as the glorious Aphrodite
was born of the ferment and pother of the waves of the sea. Lefevre's
new idea clothed itself in the form of a comparative question--_Why
should there not be Transfusion of Nervous Force, Ether, or Electricity,
just as there is Transfusion of Blood?_

He pushed his dinner away (he could scarcely have told what he had been
eating and drinking), called for his bill, and returned with all speed
to the hospital. He entered his female ward just as evening prayers were
finished, before the lights were turned out and ni