“This is my wife’s doing, no doubt,” said Mr. Prohack, limply shaking hands.

“She called to see me, ostensibly about herself, but of course in fact about you.  However, I thought she needed a tonic, and I’ll write out the prescription while I’m here.  Now what’s the matter with you?”

“No!” Mr. Prohack burst out, “I’m hanged if I’ll tell you.  I’m not going to do your work for you.  Find out.”

Dr. Veiga examined, physically and orally, and then said:  “There’s nothing at all the matter with you, my friend.”

“That’s just where you’re mistaken,” Mr. Prohack retorted.  “There’s something rather serious the matter with me.  I’m suffering from grave complications.  Only you can’t help me.  My trouble is spiritual.  Neither pills nor tonics can touch it.  But that doesn’t make it any better.”

“Try me,” said Dr. Veiga.  “I’m admirable on the common physical ailments, and by this time I should have been universally recognised as a great man if common ailments were uncommon; because you know in my profession you never get any honour unless you make a study of diseases so rare that nobody has them.  Discover a new disease, and save the life of some solitary nigger who brought it to Liverpool, and you’ll be a baronet in a fortnight and a member of all the European academies in a month.  But study colds, indigestion and insomnia, and change a thousand lives a year from despair to felicity, and no authority will take the slightest notice of you ...  As with physical, so with mental diseases—­or spiritual, if you like to call them so.  You don’t suspect that in the common mental diseases I’m a regular benefactor of mankind; but I am.  I don’t blame you for not knowing it, because you’re about the last person I should have thought susceptible to any mental disease, and so you’ve had no chance of finding out.  Now, what is it?”

“Don’t I tell you I’m suffering from horrible complications?” cried Mr. Prohack.

“What kind of complications?”

“Every kind.  My aim has always been to keep my life simple, and I succeeded very well—­perhaps too well—­until I inherited money.  I don’t mind money, but I do mind complications.  I don’t want a large house—­because it means complications.  I desire Sissie’s happiness, but I hate weddings.  I desire to be looked after, but I hate strange servants.  I can find pleasure in a motor-car, but I hate even the risk of accidents.  I have no objection to an income, but I hate investments.  And so on.  All I ask is to live simply and sensibly, but instead of that my existence is transformed into a quadratic equation.  And I can’t stop it.  My happiness is not increasing—­it’s decreasing.  I spend more and more time in wondering whither I am going, what I am after, and where precisely is the point of being alive at all.  That’s a fact, and now you know it.”

Dr. Veiga rose from his chair and deliberately sat down on the side of his patient’s bed.  The gesture in itself was sufficiently unprofessional, but he capped it with another of which probably no doctor had ever been guilty in a British sick-room before; he pulled out a pocket-knife and became his own manicure, surveying his somewhat neglected hands with a benevolently critical gaze, smiling at them as if to say:  “What funny hands you are!”