“By all the established tests.  As a matter of fact many of our best drinking waters have all sorts of unspecified qualities.  Burton water, for example, is radioactive by Beetham’s standards up to the ninth degree.  But that is by the way.  My theory about your case is that this produced a change in your blood, that quickened your sensibilities and your critical faculties just at a time when a good many bothers—­I don’t of course know what they were, but I can, so to speak, see the marks all over you—­came into your life.”

The bishop nodded.

“You were uprooted.  You moved from house to house, and failed to get that curled up safe feeling one has in a real home in any of them.”

“If you saw the fireplaces and the general decoration of the new palace!” admitted the bishop.  “I had practically no control.”

“That confirms me,” said Dr. Dale.  “Insomnia followed, and increased the feeling of physical strangeness by increasing the bodily disturbance.  I suspect an intellectual disturbance.”

He paused.

“There was,” said the bishop.

“You were no longer at home anywhere.  You were no longer at home in your diocese, in your palace, in your body, in your convictions.  And then came the war.  Quite apart from everything else the mind of the whole world is suffering profoundly from the shock of this war—­much more than is generally admitted.  One thing you did that you probably did not observe yourself doing, you drank rather more at your meals, you smoked a lot more.  That was your natural and proper response to the shock.”

“Ah!” said the bishop, and brightened up.

“It was remarked by Tolstoy, I think, that few intellectual men would really tolerate the world as it is if it were not for smoking and drinking.  Even novelists have their moments of lucidity.  Certainly these things soothe the restlessness in men’s minds, deaden their sceptical sensibilities.  And just at the time when you were getting most dislodged—­you gave them up.”

“And the sooner I go back to them the better,” said the bishop brightly.  “I quite see that.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Dr. Dale....

(3)

“That,” said Dr. Dale, “is just where my treatment of this case differs from the treatment of “—­he spoke the name reluctantly as if he disliked the mere sound of it—­“Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey.”

“Hitherto, of course,” said the bishop, “I’ve been in his hands.”

“He,” said Dr. Dale, “would certainly set about trying to restore your old sphere of illusion, your old familiar sensations and ideas and confidences.  He would in fact turn you back.  He would restore all your habits.  He would order you a rest.  He would send you off to some holiday resort, fresh in fact but familiar in character, the High lands, North Italy, or Switzerland for example.  He would forbid you newspapers and order you to botanize and prescribe tranquillizing reading; Trollope’s