Another form that the idea of persecution sometimes takes, in this second stage, is the delusion that the patient is neglected by those who should specially care for him or her. A woman insists that she is neglected by her husband. She may become intensely jealous of him and make life extremely miserable for him without there being any good reason for her jealousy. These cases are not nearly so rare as might be thought. On the other hand, men suspect their wives of unfaithfulness. This suspicion may go to very serious lengths in persecution at home, though the man all the time keeps his suspicions to himself, in order not to make a laughing stock of himself outside of the house. It is this curious mixture of {290} rationality and delusion that is the characteristic feature of the disease. It is for this reason that these conditions were sometimes called monomanias, as if patients were really disturbed only on one point. As a matter of fact, however, patients are mentally wrong on a number of points, though there is some one mental aberration so much more prominent than other peculiarities that it overshadows the others. It is not long after the persecutory stage sets in before patients are apt to become themselves persecutors of others as a result of their belief that they are being persecuted. The French have a suggestive expression for this. It is _persécutés persécuteurs_, that is to say, "persecuted persecutors,"--patients who are trying to repay supposed persecutors by persecution on their own part. Such patients, of course, very easily become dangerous. They need to be carefully watched. As a rule, the persons whom they are prone to select as the persecutors upon whom they must avenge themselves are absolutely innocent parties. At times they are even dear and well meaning friends. After the persecutory stage in paranoia, comes the third, or so-called expansive period of the disease. It has been remarked that sometimes this develops as a sort of logical sequence from the patient's ideas of persecution. If he has too many enemies and if important secret organisations are trying to be rid of him, he must be a person of some importance. As a consequence he evolves for himself a royal or aristocratic descent, or hints that he is the unacknowledged son of great personages. In a kingdom royalty is, of course, a dominant idea. In a republic like our own, he may consider himself to be the President or the politician to whom the President owes his office.