knew that instead of thinking about his business he was thinking about another woman.  Could he shut the front door every afternoon on his business, the effect would not only be beneficial upon it and upon him, but his wife would smile the warm smile of wisdom justified.  Like most women, she has a firmer grasp of the essence of life than the man upon whom she is dependent.  She knows with her heart (what he only knows with his brain) that business, politics, and “all that sort of thing” are secondary to real existence, the mere preliminaries of it.  She would rejoice, in the blush of the compliment he was paying her, that he had at last begun to comprehend the ultimate values!

So far as I am aware, there is no patent device for suddenly gaining that control of the mind which will enable one to free it from an obsession such as the obsession of the plain man.  The desirable end can, however, be achieved by slow degrees, and by an obvious method which contains naught of the miraculous.  If the victim of the obsession will deliberately try to think of something else, or to think of nothing at all—­every time he catches himself in the act of thinking about his business out of hours, he certainly will, sooner or later—­probably in about a fortnight—­cure the obsession, or at least get the upper hand of it.  The treatment demands perseverance, but it emphatically does not demand an impossibly powerful effort.  It is an affair of trifling pertinacious touches.

It is a treatment easier to practise during daylight, in company, when distractions are plentiful, than in the solitude of the night.  Triumphantly to battle with an obsession at night, when the vitality is low and the egoism intensified, is extremely difficult.  But the small persistent successes of the day will gradually have their indirect influence on the night.  A great deal can also be done by simple resolute suggestion.  Few persons seem to know—­what is, nevertheless, a fact—­that the most effective moment for making resolves is in the comatose calm which precedes going to sleep.  The entire organism is then in a passive state, and more permanently receptive of the imprint of volition than at any other period of the twenty-four hours.  If regularly at that moment the man says clearly and imperiously to himself, “I will not allow my business to preoccupy me at home; I will not allow my business to preoccupy me at home; I will not allow my business to preoccupy me at home,” he will be astonished at the results; which results, by the way, are reached by subconscious and therefore unperceived channels whose workings we can only guess at.

And when the obsession is beaten, destroyed, he will find himself not merely fortified with the necessary pluck and initiative for importing a new interest into his existence.  His instincts of their own accord will be asking for that interest, for they will have been set free.

V