“What,” asked Peter Jameson, “is the real cause of this neurasthenia? Is it a mental trouble or a physical one? I’ve had the devil’s own time since I saw you last. I’m as nervy as fourteen cats. My hands wobble all over the place. I don’t seem able to control my memory. I’ve had three nightmares in four nights; and woken up screaming my guts out. What’s wrong—my mind or my body?” “Can you separate ’em?” said Heron Baynet. “You’re not God. Nor am I. I’m only a doctor: but I don’t know more about both your body and your mind than you do. Now listen. . . .” So, twice weekly, the educative process went on. And gradually, with the coming of knowledge, fear abated. § 2 But Patricia’s fears did not abate. To her, the days were terror; the nights, agony. The very love she bore her husband became a scourge. For Patricia was not interested in “cases”: her interest lay in Peter the man. And Peter the man, as she saw him now, seemed utterly broken. She lived too close to his body, too far from his mind, to be aware of the gradual cure which was being wrought in him. She saw only the shaking hands, the glaring eyes of neurasthenia; heard only its high-pitched quavering voice, its outbursts of uncontrollable rage, its intolerable depressions. Night after night, Peter’s screams woke her from tormented sleep: day after day his temper fretted her almost to breaking point. Yet, out of the very love which scourged her, Patricia fashioned healing for him. Calm, clear-eyed, infinitely tender, mastering herself to save him, she walked by his side through the cold shadows—understanding sometimes, pitying always, but faltering never, learning with each painful step Love’s ultimate lesson, the lesson of self-sacrifice. And always, as she walked beside him, the petty responsibilities of home-keeping—responsibilities she had never known in the sheltered days of their Kensington existence—fretted at her mind. (They are not “literature,” these responsibilities of home-keeping; they are neither dramatic, nor romantic: but, for the women of what we in England call the “middle-class,” they are “life”—the instant problem of existence, its thousand daily pettinesses which may not be postponed. Only the “middle-class” woman, the woman of moderate income who wants not a house but a _home_, will understand how much these responsibilities added to Patricia’s burden!). . . . One other burden, too, she carried on her willing shoulders through those dark days of January, 1917—the burden of her responsibility for Francis Gordon. Her brain was never quite free from the picture of the long writing-room, the fire in the grate, the dark bookshelves against the cream walls, and the big desk under the window—the desk—and the silver photograph-frame—and the menacing fully-cocked pistol.