“This was very possible, considering their tendencies to commit blunders. Then I asked her if she were able to follow what I was saying. I saw at once that she was not a distinct dissociation case, that her dual personalities were not ignorant of each other, as is frequently found in some of the more pronounced cases that have come under my observation. It was obvious also that Floria and Florence Ballau were gradually merging into a single personality with the result that the young woman, instead of suffering from periodic and isolated attacks of what we may call insanity, attacks which after their conclusion left her the normal Florence Ballau we knew, was now become a single disordered brain. “The air-tight compartments in which each of her personalities had their separate being had broken. The result was this distracted semi-maniacal young woman who had fled from the police station to Rollo to hide. I explained all this to her and she was able to follow me in part. It was necessary to explain the thing, first, in order to give her a momentary consciousness, that is, a perspective, and, secondly, in order to assure her that craft and concealment were futile. “Well, when I had finished she took up the story and cleared away several of the details which had bothered me. Her confession was extremely interesting from a scientific point of view.” “She confessed the murder?” De Medici murmured. “Saying she remembered it?” “In due time, Julien. Before reaching the murder, and in order to understand it, we must establish the scientific motive. As the morning progressed Florence, or Floria, grew calm and extremely docile. I placed the entire conversation on a scientific basis, a ruse which invariably disarms criminals of her type. For instance, I asked her if she knew when she had experienced the shock which had caused the dissociation or duality of ego. She told me the thing had happened or must have happened when she was quite a child. This, as you know, is frequently the case. Victor Ballau had once tried to kill her father, a man named Bandoux. Poor Ballau was in love with Bandoux’s wife. And Bandoux’s wife was her mother. Ballau had conceived a desperate passion for the woman. Failing somehow to kill the man, he concentrated his jealousy on the wife. In the child’s mind there came the realization that this Ballau was at the time causing her mother, whom she idolized, trouble and anguish. She told me that she remembers one night seeing her mother lying on the floor of a room and sobbing. Ballau had reviled and struck her in a jealous rage. Florence remembered also that her mother had cried out on the night she died that she would be avenged. The child was perhaps only three or four years old at the time, but the scene was sufficient to produce the shock which later brought the duality on.