tution in
toto, arguing that it hurts the system with its unexpected shock, doing
more harm than good. There are others who believe in nothing but
shocks, and similar methods of treatment out of the common run; and
these "go in" for shower-baths, "a discretion"--though, without
discretion, would, perhaps, be a truer description. You may not be
informed, also, that the "institution" is frequently used in lunatic
asylums and penal establishments as an instrument of torture and
correction, being known to operate most efficaciously on obstreperous
and hardened criminals, when all other means of coercion have failed.

As it is with the shower-bath physically considered, so it is in regard
to the moral douche, to bring my apparent digression to a pointed
application. Properly taken, it nerves up the cerebral tissues;
experienced unawares, at right angles to previous paths of thought and
preparation, it reduces the patient to a temporary state of mental coma
and bewilderment--as exemplified in my case on the present unhappy
occasion.

I never felt so completely "flabbergasted," as sailors say, in my life,
as when Min's mother came into the room that afternoon, just at the
moment when I was meditating a master-stroke against the fortress of my
darling's heart.

I trembled in my boots.

I wished the earth to open and swallow me up!

Mrs Clyde was a thorough woman of the world. Judging her out of her
own circle of limited diameter, you would imagine her to be cool,
unimpassioned, cold-blooded, narrow-minded; but, she could be, at the
same time, bigoted enough in regard to all that concerned herself, her
social surroundings and her belongings--an advocate, as warm as
Demosthenes, as logical as Cicero:--a partisan amongst partisans. Warm
and impulsive, where fervour and a display of seemingly-generous
enthusiasm would effect the object she had in view, that of compassing
her ends, she could also be as frigid as an icicle, when it likewise so
suited her purpose. "Respectability" and "position" were her gods:--the
"world"--_her_ world!--her microcosm.

Where persons and things agreed with these, being sympathetic to their
rules and regulations, they naturally belonged to "the house beautiful"
of her creed, for they _must_ be good:--where they ran counter to such
standards of merit, which were upheld by laws as unvarying and
unchangeable as those of the Medes and Persians, and administered by a
judge as stern as Draco--t