“It looks to me like you are fundamentally as sound as a dollar,” he said, his fine brow furrowed, “but your case puzzles me a lot. To be frank, you are entirely too thin, your cheeks are sunken, your skin is dry, and your eye dull. You are very nervous, and are growing gray hairs as fast as crab-grass. Somehow, I don't think you need any sort of medicine. Now, if you were not absolutely the luckiest man in Georgia, I'd think you had something to worry about. Worry has killed more men than all the plagues on earth; but that can't be your trouble, for every good thing in life has come your way. You had a great ambition a few years ago, but you gratified it; surely you don't want to own any more railroads.” “No, one is enough,” Galt answered, with a faint, forced smile. “I can't say that I am worrying over that.” “Well, the condition of the minds of patients,” said Dearing, “is the biggest thing doctors have to tackle. We can hold our own with a disease of the body, because we can see it and, at least, experiment with it for good or bad; but when the seat of the thing is in a man's soul, and he won't uncover it, but keeps fooling himself and his doctor by looking for it under his hide or in his blood or bones, why, we are at a standstill. I had a patient once who certainly had me at my wit's end. He was sound as you are physically, but he was restless, dissatisfied, morbid, lonely, and utterly miserable. I exhausted every resource on him. I sent him to specialists all over America, but they were as helpless as I was. Finally, in sheer desperation, I took the bull by the horns and asked him if he had anything on his mind of a disagreeable nature. He hung his head, and I knew then that something was wrong. I pumped him adroitly, assuring him that all private matters were held in confidence by a physician, and he finally made a clean breast of it. He was a rich man, but every dollar he owned had been accumulated from money stolen from another man, and a man who had failed in life and died in abject poverty.” “Ah, I see!” Galt sat more erect, his eyes fixed on Dearing's face. “That was his trouble; and what did he do about it?” “Died hugging the rotten thing to his breast,” the doctor said; “and that is the way with most of them. He couldn't face the music--he couldn't confess to the puny little world around him that he wasn't what it had always thought him. Perhaps he had gone too far to believe in the cure that God has made possible for every poor devil in toils of that sort. That's the trouble. Spirituality has to be practised to be a reality. Faith cures of all sorts have their place in the world, for a sick soul will certainly make a sick body.” “So you believe in rubbish of that sort,” Galt said, contemptuously.