“Not so fast! I am painting a good woman. Here comes in a condition which hardly any one takes into account. Mrs. Jumeau will lie with stiffened limbs and blue pale face for hours at a time. Is she simulating illness? you might as well say that a man could simulate a gunshot wound. But the thing people forget is, the intimate relation and co-operation of body and mind; that the body lends itself _involuntarily_ to carry out the conceptions of the thinking brain. Mrs. Jumeau does not _think_ herself into pallor, but every infinitesimal nerve fibre, which entwines each equally infinitesimal capillary which brings colour to the cheek, is intimately connected with the thinking brain, in obedience to whose mandates it relaxes or contracts. Its relaxation brings colour and vigour with the free flow of the blood, its contraction, pallor, and stagnation; and the feeling as well as the look of being sealed in a death-like trance. The whole mystery depends on this co-operation of thought and substance of which few women are aware. The diagnosis is simply this, the sufferer has the craving for outward tokens of the esteem which is essential to her nature; she recalls how such tokens accompany her seasons of illness, the sympathetic body perceives the situation, and she is ill; by-and-by, the tokens of esteem cease to come with the attacks of illness, but the habit has been set up, and she goes on having ‘attacks ’ which bring real suffering to herself, and of the slightest agency in which she is utterly unconscious.” Conviction slowly forced itself on Mr. Jumeau; now that his wife was shown entirely blameless, he could concede the rest. More, he began to suspect something rotten in the State of Denmark, or women like his wife would never have been compelled to make so abnormal a vent for a craving proper to human nature. “I begin to see; what must I do?” “In Mrs. Jumeau’s case, I may venture to recommend a course which would not answer with one in a thousand. Tell her all I have told you. Make her mistress of the situation.--I need not say, save her as much as you can from the anguish of self-contempt. Trust her, she will come to the rescue, and devise means to save herself; and, all the time, she will want help from you, wise as well as tender. For the rest, those who have in less measure-- “‘The reason firm, the temp’rate will’-- ‘massage,’ and other devices for annulling the extraordinary physical sensibility to mental conditions, and, at the same time, excluding the patient from the possibility of the affectionate notice she craves, may do a great deal. But this mischief which, in one shape or other, blights the lives of, say, forty per cent. of our best and most highly organised women, is one more instance of how lives are ruined by an education which is not only imperfect, but proceeds on wrong lines.” “How could education help in this?”