Dick Hand at forty-two had, as has been said, a tremendous reputation and an equally tremendous dissatisfaction. The one had no perceptible relation to the other. Of the one the world was thoroughly aware, of the other it was not. His dissatisfaction was known to Richard Hand alone.

There were times when it swayed him absolutely, When it “came over him,” and he could not get away from it. He could not have told you what it was,[241] really; for sometimes he felt it to be one thing, sometimes another. Now it was an immense discontent with all he had done or was doing, now it was an unreasonable irritation with life itself.

Everything, he found at such times, was worthless.

One day, in a fit of absolute disgust, he went to a specialist. He had no expectation that the man could help him, but he had got where he must do something.

He had expected to be shown into a darkened room where a fellow more or less dressed for a part would take his hand gravely, as if performing a rite, and then, retreating to the distance and becoming semi-invisible, would intone questions in a ceremonial voice while the conversation was written down on the wax tablets of a silently travelling phonograph.

But the office was as unlike that as possible, and so was the specialist.

A bright room with a sort of sun-parlour on the south side, a place of wicker furniture and cretonnes, with books and magazines lying about and tobacco on the table. With his eyeglasses and a sober seriousness of face when in repose, the man who received him was hardly distinguishable from a business man of comfortable habit, moderately large affairs, and fairly frequent preoccupations. They shook hands; the specialist offered Mr. Hand a cigarette and took one himself.

“Let’s come out here,” he said, indicating the sun-parlour.[242] “It’s pleasanter and the chairs are better to lounge in.”

They disposed themselves and puffed away for a moment or two.

“I’ve come to see if you can help me,” explained Dick Hand, rather desperately. The other nodded.

“I get fairly sick of—existence,” Dick went on. “I’m restless and rottenly dissatisfied, and I don’t know why. Nothing seems to mean anything. I have these spells, and they are commoner than they used to be.”

“Tell me all about yourself,” suggested the other. “Only what you call to mind and only what you care to tell.”

Dick hesitated. “I thought,” he said, “that you people asked questions—to get at certain things hidden from us of whom you ask them.”

“Well, we do that,” admitted the specialist. “But it usually is better to hear a man’s own story first. After we have got the things a man readily recalls, comes the problem of getting at the things he doesn’t recall.”

“I suppose the idea is the relief afforded by making a clean breast of things,” hazarded Dick.

“Not entirely. It goes beyond that. It aims at relieving unsuspected pressures. There’s a sort of an analogy in a physical injury, such as a fracture. The man who has the fracture knows that something is[243] wrong, he suffers intense pain, but he doesn’t know that a bone is broken, or, if he does, he doesn’t know just where, nor how to set it. And he suffers too much to be able to find out.”

“Well, there’s certainly a fracture somewhere in my life,” said Dick Hand, grimly. “And I suffer. And I don’t know where it is or how to set it.”

After a little pause he entered upon his story. It was when he had entirely finished and sat silent that the specialist spoke again.

“You say you were once in love?”

“It was the only time I ever was in love,” replied Richard Hand. “She was two years younger than I. We more or less grew up together. We were both in our twenties when she refused me for good and all. She was already in love with another man and she was married to him a little later.”

“You use the past tense. Is she dead?”

“No, she isn’t. She is alive and has four children. Her husband has disappeared lately, left her and the children. By the way, he would make a case for you! If you could cure him I’d say you could cure anybody.”

“It isn’t we who cure,” explained the other man patiently. “We no more cure a man than do............