“To feel that my health is no longer perfect enough to defend me against—­I might call it ennui.”

“Yes?”

“Or I might call it depression, melancholy, in fact.  Now I don’t want—­I simply will not be the victim of depression, as so many women are.  Do you realise how frightfully women—­many women—­suffer secretly from depression when they—­when they begin to find out that they are not going to remain eternally young?”

“I realize it, certainly.”

“I will not be the victim of that depression, because it ruins one’s appearance and destroys one’s power.  I am thirty-eight.”

Her large blue eyes met the Doctor’s eyes steadily.

“Yes?”

“In England nowadays that isn’t considered anything.  In England, if one has perfect health, one may pass for a charming and attractive woman till one is at least fifty, or even more.  But to seem young when one is getting on, one must feel young.  Now, I no longer feel young.  I am positive feeling young is a question of physical health.  I believe almost everything one feels is a question of physical health.  Mystics, people who believe in metempsychosis, in the progress upward and immortality of the soul, idealists—­they would cry out against me as a rank materialist.  But you are a doctor, and know the empire of the body.  Am I not right?  Isn’t almost everything one feels an emanation from one’s molecules, or whatever they are called?  Isn’t it an echo of the chorus of one’s atoms?”

“No doubt the state of the body affects the state of the mind.”

“How cautious you are!”

A rather contemptuous smile flickered over her too red lips.

“And really you must be in absolute antagonism with the priests, the Christian Scientists, with all the cranks and the self-deceivers who put soul above matter, who pretend that soul is independent of matter.  Why, only the other day I was reading about the psychophysical investigations with the pneumograph and the galvanometer, and I’m certain that—­” Suddenly she checked herself.  “But that’s beside the question.  I’ve told you what I mean, what I think, that health triumphs over nearly everything.”

“You seem to be very convinced, a very sincere materialist.”

“And you?”

“Despite the discoveries of science, I think there are still depths of mystery in man.”

“Woman included?”

“Oh, dear, yes!  But to return to your condition.”

“Ah!”

She glanced at a watch on her wrist.

“Your day of work, ends—?”

“At six, as a rule.”

“I mustn’t keep you.  The truth is this.  I am losing my zest for life, and because I am losing my zest, I am losing my power over life.  I am beginning to feel weary, melancholy, sometimes apprehensive.”

“Of what?”

“Middle age, I suppose, and the ending of all things.”

“And you want me to prescribe against melancholy?”