"This marriage," he said. "When I came to the wedding, I could not escape a heavy portent of danger. There was the difference in age to start with and it was heightened by Eben's solemn and grandiose tendencies. His nature had too much shadow--not enough sunlight. The girl on the other hand had a vitality which was supernormal." He paused and Stuart Farquaharson, restrained by a flood of personal reminiscence, said nothing. Finally the doctor went on: "But there was more than that. I'm a Massachusetts man myself, but Eben is--or was--in type, too damned much the New Englander." Stuart smiled to himself, but his prompting question came in the tone of commonplace. "Just what does that mean to you, Doctor--too much the New Englander?" Ebbett laughed. "I use the word only as a term--as descriptive of an intolerance which exists everywhere, north and south, east and west--but in Eben it was exaggerated. Fortunately, his wife's exuberance of spirit seems to have brightened it into normality." "But what, exactly, did you fear, Doctor?" "I'm afraid I'd have to grow tediously technical to make that clear, but if you can stand it, I'll try." "I wish you would," the younger man assured him. Dr. Ebbett leaned back and studied the ash of his cigar. "Have you ever noticed in your experience," he abruptly demanded, "that oftentimes the man who most craftily evades his taxes or indulges in devious business methods, cannot bring himself to sanction any of the polite and innocent lies which society accepts as conventions?" Stuart nodded and the physician went on: "In short we encounter, every day, the apparent hypocrite. Yet many such men are not consciously dishonest. They are merely victims of disassociation." "I'm afraid," acknowledged Stuart, "I'm still too much the tyro to understand the term very fully." "None of us understand it as fully as we'd like," Dr. Ebbett assured him. "But we are gradually learning. In every man's consciousness there is a stream of thought which we call the brain content. Below the surface of consciousness, there is a second stream of thought as unrecognized as a dream, but none the less potent." The speaker paused and Farquaharson waited in silence for him to continue. "The broader a man's habit of thought," went on the physician slowly, "the fewer impulses he is called upon to repress because he is frank. The narrower his code, the more things there are which are thrust down into his proscribed list of inhibitions. The peril lies in the fact that this stream of repressed thought is acting almost as directly on the man's life and conduct, as the one of which he is constantly aware. He has more than one self, and since he admits but one, the others are in constant and secret intrigue, against him." "And this makes for unconscious hypocrisy?"