Dr. Crossett was finding it a difficult matter to keep from falling to sleep. The dinner had been stupid, even for a formal affair of this sort, where one scarcely expects to be entertained. He had worked hard all day at the hospital, and after making a brief speech introducing the guest of honor of the evening, he sat with his chair pushed back from the disordered dinner table and resigned himself to his fate. A man could hardly be talked to death in two hours, he thought, and after all there was hope; perhaps the half hour of informal conversation that always followed the speech-making might be less deadly than usual. What a fool he was to give his time to these riots of platitude; he swore softly to himself as he looked through the haze of tobacco smoke at the faces of many of the foremost medical and psychological authorities of France, and, as he always did upon occasions of this kind, laid elaborate plans for immediately resigning from the society. He had in fact almost finished a mental draft of his letter of resignation, when the sound of a hundred voices blending into a confused babel of conversation warned him that the formal speech-making was over. "Thank God for that," he exclaimed in English, turning to his right-hand neighbor, an American psychologist named Miller, whom he had met for the first time that evening. "You were not especially entertained?" questioned that gentleman, with a smile. "And yet we have listened to several rather deep and weighty opinions." "Weighty, I grant you," replied the Doctor. "Heavy possibly would have been a better word. Why is it that a man, who in himself is both wise and entertaining, always becomes both a pedant and a bore when he makes an after-dinner speech?" "The effort to dominate too many, and too varied an assortment of minds, no doubt, a species of self-hypnotism; but Professor Carney's remarks on the distinction between insanity and moral depravity were interesting. I have just arrived from America, and it is possible that the ideas he advanced, although fresh to me, may be an old story to you." "We have worked much together, Carney and I," replied the Doctor. "He knows the subject well enough, although we do not agree in all things. He, for instance, classes many cases as insanity, which to me are plainly a lack of moral, not of mental, strength. He denies the existence of an absolutely unmoral person whose mind is sound and whose power of reasoning is normal. To him such a case does not exist."