“OH no,” the specialist said, “I don’t see what purpose it would serve, your telling his wife exactly what happened. I prefer, indeed, that you should not. No doubt it was the shock of hearing the voice on the telephone that actually induced the state of mind. But to know the fact doesn’t help us--it doesn’t help us towards the cure. All we can do is to wait. His chance is that he’s not such a very young man. If it had happened ten years ago there wouldn’t have been any chance for him at all; but the brain-fibre--what the Germans call the _Hirnstoff_--is tougher now. Anyhow, we can’t say.” Sir William Wells, an unreasonably lugubrious man of fifty, having in his eyes the look of a man doomed beyond hope, with ruffled grey hair, an untidy grey beard, very dark eyebrows, a whitish complexion, in which tints of blue predominated, except that on his cheek-bones were patches of red so bright that he had the appearance of having rouged--with an air, in fact, of having had all his hair ruffled up the wrong way, and of remaining still a personage of importance--Sir William Wells repeated: “All we can do is to wait.” “Don’t you think,” Robert Grimshaw said--they were in the great man’s first-class consulting-room--a tall place, very gay, with white walls, bright plaster-worked ceiling, chairs with seats and backs of scarlet leather, and numerous cabinets inlaid with green and yellow wood, very shiny and new, and yet conveying a sinister suspicion that they contained not rose-leaves, silks, or bibelots, but instruments, diagrams, and disinfectants--“don’t you think,” Robert Grimshaw said, “that, since his mania, if it is a mania, is so much along the lines of his ordinary character, that is an indication that his particular state is not so very serious?” “My dear sir,” the specialist answered, “what we’ve got to do is to establish whether there is or isn’t a lesion in the brain. His character’s nothing to do with it.” “Of course we’re in your hands,” Grimshaw answered, “but I should have thought that a man who’s been abnormal all his life ...” “My dear sir,” Sir William repeated, shaking his glasses as if minatorily at Grimshaw’s nose, “have you any profession? I suppose not. But if you had a profession you would know how utterly impossible the suggestions of laymen are to the professional. People come to me for this sort of thing because I have had thousands--literally, thousands--of similar cases. It’s no good my considering individual eccentricities; my business is to put my finger on the spot.” “Then, what do you propose to do?” Grimshaw said. “Nothing,” the specialist answered. “For the present, absolutely nothing.” “But don’t you think a change ...” Grimshaw suggested. Having entirely redecorated his house from top to bottom in order to indicate that he was more prosperous than Dr. Gegg of No. 161, Sir William, who was heavily indebted to Jews, was upon the turning-point between bankruptcy and possible salvation.