ly at
the bishop's face with a distinctly sceptical grey eye; he could not
have looked harder if he had been a photographer or a portrait painter.
And his voice was harsh, and the bishop was particularly sensitive to
voices.

He began by understanding far too much of the bishop's illness, and he
insisted on various familiarities with the bishop's heart and tongue and
eye and knee that ruffled the bishop's soul.

"Brighton-Pomfrey talked of neurasthenia?" he asked. "That was his
diagnosis," said the bishop. "Neurasthenia," said the young man as
though he despised the word.

The bishop went on buttoning up his coat.

"You don't of course want to break your vows about drinking and
smoking," said the young man with the very faintest suggestion of
derision in his voice.

"Not if it can possibly be avoided," the bishop asserted. "Without a
loss, that is, of practical efficiency," he added. "For I have much to
do."

"I think that it is possible to keep your vow," said the young man,
and the bishop could have sworn at him. "I think we can manage that all
right."

(2)

The bishop sat at the table resting his arm upon it and awaiting the
next development of this unsatisfactory interview. He was on the verge
of asking as unpleasantly as possible when Brighton-Pomfrey would
return.

The young man stood upon Brighton-Pomfrey's hearth-rug and was evidently
contemplating dissertations.

"Of course," he said, as though he discussed a problem with himself,
"you must have some sort of comfort. You must get out of this state, one
way or another."

The bishop nodded assent. He had faint hopes of this young man's ideas
of comfort.

Dr. Dale reflected. Then he went off away from the question of comfort
altogether. "You see, the trouble in such a case as this is peculiarly
difficult to trace to its sources because it comes just upon the
border-line of bodily and mental things. You may take a drug or alter
your regimen and it disturbs your thoughts, you may take an idea and
it disturbs your health. It is easy enough to say, as some do, that all
ideas have a physical substratum; it is almost as easy to say with the
Christian Scientist that all bodily states are amenable to our ideas.
The truth doesn't, I think, follow the border between those opposite
opinions very exactly on either side. I can't, for instance, tell you to
go home and pray against these uncertainties and despairs, because it
is just these uncertainties and