When Overholt had been alone for some time, he got up from the horsehair sofa and crept up the stairs, leaning on the shaky bannister like an old man.  In his own room he plunged his face into icy cold water again and again, as if it were burning, and the sharp chill revived his nerves a little.  There was no stove in the room, and before midnight the water would be frozen in the pitcher.  He sat down and rubbed his forehead and wondered whether he was really any better, or was only imagining or even pretending that he was, because he wanted to be.  Our own reflections about our own sensations are never so silly as at the greatest moments in our lives, because the tremendous strain on the higher faculties releases all the little ones, as in sleep, and they behave and reason as idiotically as they do in dreams, which is saying a good deal.  Perhaps lunatics are only people who are perpetually asleep and dreaming with one part of their brains while the other parts are awake.  They certainly behave as if that were the matter, and it seems a rational explanation of ordinary insanity, curable or incurable.  Did you ever talk to a lunatic?  On the subject on which he is insane he thinks and talks as you do when you are dreaming; but he may be quite awake and sensible about all other matters.  He dreams he is rich, and he goes out and orders cartloads of things from shops.  Pray, have you never dreamt that you were rich?  Or he dreams that he is a poached egg, and must have a piece of toast to sit down upon.  I believe that well-known story of a lunatic to be founded on fact.  Have you never dreamt that you were somebody or something quite different from yourself?  Have you never dreamt that you were an innocent man, persecuted, tried for a crime, and sentenced to prison, or even death?  And yet, at the same time, in your dream, you were behaving with the utmost good sense about everything else.  When you are dreaming, you are a perfect lunatic; why may it not be true that the waking lunatic is really dreaming all the time, with one part of his brain?

John Henry Overholt was apparently wide awake, but he had been morally stunned that day; he was dreaming that he was going crazy, and he could not, for the life of him, tell whether he really felt any better after cooling his head in the basin than before, though it seemed immensely important to find out, just then.  Afterwards, when it was all over, and things were settled again, he remembered only a blank time, which had lasted from the moment when he had broken down before the little City until he found himself sitting in the parlour alone before the supper table with a bright lamp burning, and wondering why his boy did not come home.  The dream was over then; his head ached a good deal and he did not feel hungry, but that was all; burning anxiety had cooled to leaden care.  He knew quite well that it was all over with the Motor, that his friends at the College would find him some sort of employment, and that in due