Perhaps it would be wiser never to go into society. A hospital-ward is far more natural to me than a ball-room. There, is work to be done, pain to be alleviated, evil of all kinds to be met and overcome--here, nothing but pleasure, nothing to do but to enjoy. Yet some people can enjoy; and actually do so; I am sure that girl did. Several times during the evening she looked quite happy. I do not often see people looking happy. Is suffering then our normal and natural state? Is to exist synonymous with to endure? Can this be the law of a beneficent Providence?--or are such results allowed--to happen in certain exceptional cases, utterly irremediable and irretrievable--like-- What am I writing?--What am I daring to write? ***** _Physician, heal thyself._ And surely that is one of a physician's first duties. A disease struck inwards--the merest tyro knows how fatal is treatment which results in that. It may be I have gone on the wrong track altogether,--at least since my return to England. The present only is a man's possession: the past is gone out of his hand,--wholly, irrevocably. He may suffer from it, learn from it--in degree, perhaps, expiate it; but to brood over it is utter madness. Now, I have had many cases of insanity--both physical and moral, so to speak; I call moral insanity that kind of disease which is super-induced on comparatively healthy minds by dwelling incessantly on one idea; the sort of disease which you find in women who have fallen into melancholy from love-disappointments; or in men for overweening ambition, hatred, or egotism--which latter, carried to a high pitch, invariably becomes a kind of insanity. All these forms of monomania, as distinguished from physical mania, disease of the structure of the brain, I have studied with considerable interest and corresponding success. My secret was simple enough; one which Nature herself often tries and rarely fails in--the law of substitution; the slow eradication of any fixed idea, by supplying others, under the influence of which the original idea is, at all events temporarily, laid to sleep. Why cannot I try this plan? why not do for myself what I have so many times prescribed and done for others? It was with some notion of the kind that I went to this ball--after getting up a vague sort of curiosity in Treherne's anonymous beauty, about whom he has so long been raving to me--boy-like. Ay, with all his folly, the lad is an honest lad. I should not like him to come to any harm. The tall one must have been the lady, and the smaller, the plainer, though the pleasanter to my mind, was no doubt her sister. And of course her name too was _Johnson_.