wn power which we have already
called more than once in the present book, the _Will_. But do not let
us trespass on the territory of medical philosophy. Let us consider
the nerves and the vapors solely in their connection with marriage.

Victims of Neurosis (a pathological term under which are comprised all
affections of the nervous system) suffer in two ways, as far as
married women are concerned; for our physiology has the loftiest
disdain for medical classifications. Thus we recognize only:

1. CLASSIC NEUROSIS.
2. ROMANTIC NEUROSIS.

The classic affection has something bellicose and excitable on it.
Those who thus suffer are as violent in their antics as pythonesses,
as frantic as _monads_, as excited as _bacchantes_; it is a revival of
antiquity, pure and simple.

The romantic sufferers are mild and plaintive as the ballads sung amid
the mists of Scotland. They are pallid as young girls carried to their
bier by the dance or by love; they are eminently elegiac and they
breathe all the melancholy of the North.

That woman with black hair, with piercing eye, with high color, with
dry lips and a powerful hand, will become excited and convulsive; she
represents the genius of classic neurosis; while a young blonde woman,
with white skin, is the genius of romantic neurosis; to one belongs
the empire gained by nerves, to the other the empire gained by vapors.

Very frequently a husband, when he comes home, finds his wife in
tears.

"What is the matter, my darling?"

"It is nothing."

"But you are in tears!"

"I weep without knowing why. I am quite sad! I saw faces in the
clouds, and those faces never appear to me except on the eve of some
disaster--I think I must be going to die."

Then she talks to you in a low voice of her dead father, of her dead
uncle, of her dead grandfather, of her dead cousin. She invokes all
these mournful shades, she feels as if she had all their sicknesses,
she is attacked with all the pains they felt, she feels her heart
palpitate with excessive violence, she feels her spleen swelling. You
say to yourself, with a self-satisfied air:

"I know exactly what this is all about!"

And then you try to soothe her; but you find her a woman who yawns
like an open box, who complains of her chest, who begins to weep anew,
who implores you to leave her to her melancholy and her mournful
memories. She talks to you about her last wishes, follows her own
funeral, is buried, plants over