“I feel just as if I were coming out of a winter. Don’t you think illness is a kind of human winter?” “Certainly—more or less stormy. With some a winter of snow and hail and piercing winds; with others of black frosts and creeping fogs, with now and then a glimmer of the sun.” “The last is more like mine. I feel as if I had been in a wet hole in the earth.” “And many a man,” I went on, “the foliage of whose character had been turning brown and seared and dry, rattling rather than rustling in the faint hot wind of even fortunes, has come out of the winter of a weary illness with the fresh delicate buds of a new life bursting from the sun-dried bark.” “I wish it would be so with me. I know you mean me. But I don’t feel my green leaves coming.” “Facts are not always indicated by feelings.” “Indeed, I hope not; nor yet feelings indicated by facts.” “I do not quite understand you.” “Well, Mr Walton, I will explain myself. I have come to tell you how sorry and ashamed I am that I behaved so badly to you every time you came to see me.” “Oh, nonsense!” I said. “It was your illness, not you.” “At least, my dear sir, the facts of my behaviour did not really represent my feelings towards you.” “I know that as well as you do. Don’t say another word about it. You had the best excuse for being cross; I should have had none for being offended.” “It was only the outside of me.” “Yes, yes; I acknowledge it heartily.” “But that does not settle the matter between me and myself, Mr Walton; although, by your goodness, it settles it between me and you. It is humiliating to think that illness should so completely ‘overcrow’ me, that I am no more myself—lose my hold, in fact, of what I call ME—so that I am almost driven to doubt my personal identity.” “You are fond of theories, Mr Stoddart—perhaps a little too much so.” “Perhaps.” “Will you listen to one of mine?” “With pleasure.” “It seems to me sometimes—I know it is a partial representation—as if life were a conflict between the inner force of the spirit, which lies in its faith in the unseen—and the outer force of the world, which lies in the pressure of everything it has to show us. The material, operating upon our senses, is always asserting its existence; and if our inner life is not equally vigorous, we shall be moved, urged, what is called actuated, from without, whereas all our activity ought to be from within. But sickness not only overwhelms the mind, but, vitiating all the channels of the senses, causes them to represent things as they are not, of which misrepresentations the presence, persistency, and iteration seduce the man to act from false suggestions instead of from what he knows and believes.” “Well, I understand all that. But what use am I to make of your theory?”