with hors-d’oeuvres. Cuckoo selected a sardine.  She understood sardines, having met them at the Monico.  Valentine and the doctor began to talk.  Julian ate slowly, and Cuckoo stole a glance at him.  His aspect startled her so much that she with difficulty repressed a murmur of astonishment.  He had the appearance of one so completely exhausted as to be scarcely alive.  Most people, however stupid, however bored, have some air, when in society, of listening even when they do not speak, of giving some sort of attention to those about them, or to the place in which they find themselves.  They glance this way and that, however phlegmatically.  They bend in attention or lean back in observation.  It is seen that they are conscious of their environment.  But Julian was engrossed with fatigue.  The lids drooped over his eyes.  His face wore a leaden hue.  Even his lips were colourless.  He ate slowly and mechanically till his plate was empty.  Then he laid down his fork and remained motionless, his eyes still cast down towards the tablecloth, his two hands laid against the table edge, while the fingers were extended upon the cloth on either side of his plate.  Cuckoo looked at him with terror, wondering if he were ill.  Then, glancing up, she met the eyes of the doctor.  They seemed to bid her take no heed of Julian’s condition, and she did not look at him again just then.  Trying to control her fears, she listened to Valentine’s conversation with the doctor.

“Doctors are sceptics by profession,” she heard him say.

“I believe in individualism too firmly to allow that any beliefs or unbeliefs can be professional, Cresswell.”

“Possibly you are right,” Valentine answered lightly.  “What a pity it is that there is no profession of which all the members at least believe in themselves.”

“Ah; would you enter it?”

“I scarcely think it would be necessary.”

He glanced first at the doctor, then at Cuckoo as he spoke.

“I am thankful to say,” he added in his clear, cool voice, “that I have no longer either the perpetual timidity of the self-doubter or even the occasional anxiety of the egoist.”

“You have passed into a region which even egoism cannot enter.”

“Possibly—­the average egoism.”

“The average egoism of the end of the century moves in a very rarefied air.”

“Its feet touch ground nevertheless.”

“And yours?”

Valentine only laughed, as if he considered the question merely rhetorical or jocose.

“But we are getting away from the question, which was not personal,” he said.  “I contend that doctors, as a body, are bound to combat these modern Athenians, who are inclined to attribute everything to some obscure action of the mind.  For, if their beliefs are founded on rock, and if they can themselves sufficiently, by asceticism, or by following any other fixed course of life which they may select as the right one, train their minds to do that which they believe can be done, the profession of doctors may in time be abolished.  Mind will be the universal medicine; will, not simply the cure, but the preventive, of disease.”