. He looked gaunt and sombrely dark in the low,
awning-shaded room, with its heavy beams and floor of wavelike
unevenness.

"You'll have to put her under care next, if you don't take some steps.
Send her for a sea-voyage."

"I'd take her myself if I thought it would do her any good," said Tims.
"But I'll lay my bottom dollar it wouldn't."

"I'm afraid I think Miss Timson's view of the matter as insane as
Milly's," returned Lady Thomson, tartly.

Ian lifted his bowed head and addressed Tims:

"I should like to know exactly what your view of the matter is, Miss
Timson. We need not discuss poor Milly's; it's too absurd and also too
painful."

"It's no doubt a case of disintegration of personality," replied Tims,
after a pause. "Somewhere inside our brains must be a nerve-centre
which co-ordinates most of our mental, our sensory and motor processes,
in such a manner as to produce consciousness, volition, what we call
personality. But after all there are always plenty of activities within
us going on independent of it. Your heart beats, your stomach
digests--even your memory works apart from your consciousness sometimes.
Now suppose some shock or strain enfeebles your centre of consciousness,
so that it ceases to be able to co-ordinate all the mental processes it
has been accustomed to superintend. What you call your personality is
the outcome of your memory and all your other faculties and tendencies
working together, checking and balancing each other. Suppose your centre
of consciousness so enfeebled; suppose at the same time an enfeeblement
of memory, causing you to completely forget external facts: certain of
your faculties and tendencies are left working and they are co-ordinated
without an important part of the memory, without many other faculties
and tendencies which checked and balanced them. Naturally you appear to
yourself and to every one else a totally different person; but it's not
a new personality really, it's only a bit of the old one which goes on
its own hook, while the rest is quiescent."

"This is the most abominably materialistic theory of the human mind I
ever heard," exclaimed Lady Thomson, indignantly. "The most degrading to
our spiritual natures."

Ian leaned against the high, carved mantel-piece and pushed back the
black hair from his forehead.

"I'm not concerned with that," he replied, deliberately, discussing
this case so vitally near to him with an almost terrible calmness. "But
I ca