He sat thus, amid the bustle and buzz of the restaurant, the coming and going of waiters, completely abstracted, assailing his difficulty with questions on this side and on that,—­when suddenly out of the mists that obscured it there rose upon his mental vision an idea, which appealed to him as a solution of the whole, and, more than that, as a secret that would revolutionise all the treatment of nervous weakness and derangement.  How came the idea?  How do ideas ever come?  As inspirations, we say, or as revelations; and truly they come upon us with such amazing and inspiriting freshness, that they may well be called either the one or the other.  But no great idea had ever yet an epiphany but from the ferment of more familiar small ideas,—­just as the glorious Aphrodite was born of the ferment and pother of the waves of the sea.  Lefevre’s new idea clothed itself in the form of a comparative question—­Why should there not be Transfusion of Nervous Force, Ether, or Electricity, just as there is Transfusion of Blood?

He pushed his dinner away (he could scarcely have told what he had been eating and drinking), called for his bill, and returned with all speed to the hospital.  He entered his female ward just as evening prayers were finished, before the lights were turned out and night began for the patients.  He summoned his trusted assistant, the house-physician, again.

“I am about to attempt,” said he, “an altogether new operation:  the patient has remained just as I left her, I suppose?”

“Just the same.”

“Nervous Force, whether it be Electricity or not, is manifestly a fluid of some sort:  why should it not be transfused as the other vital fluid is?”

“Indeed, sir, when you put it so,” said the house-physician, suddenly steeled and brightened into interest, “I should say, ‘why not?’ The only reason against it is what can be assigned against all new things—­it has not, so far as I know, been done.”

“Exactly.  I am going to try.  I think, in case we need a current, so to say, to draw it along, that we shall use the apparatus too; we shall therefore need the women.”

“You mean, of course,” said the young man, “you will cut a main nerve.”

“I shall use this nerve,” said Lefevre, indicating the main nerve in the wrist,—­upon which the young man, in his ready enthusiasm, began to bare his arm.

“My dear fellow,” said Lefevre, “do you consider what you are so promptly offering?  Do you know that my experiment, if successful, might leave you a paralytic, or an imbecile, or even—­a corpse?”

“I’ll take the risk, sir,” said the young man.

“I can’t permit it, my boy,” said Lefevre, laying his hand on his arm, and giving him a look of kindness.  “Nobody must run this risk but me.  I don’t mean, however, to cut the nerve.”

“What then, sir?”

“Well,” said Lefevre, “this Nervous Force, or Nervous Ether, is clearly a very volatile, and at the same time a very searching fluid.  It can easily pass through the skin from a nerve in one person to a nerve in another.  There is no difficulty about that; the difficulty is to set up a rapid enough vibration to whirl the current through!” He said that in meditative fashion:  he was clearly at the moment repeating the working out of the problem.