Conscience itself requires a conscience, or nothing can be more unscrupulous.  It told Saul that he did well in persecuting the Christians.  It has goaded countless multitudes of various creeds to endless forms of self-torture.  The cities of India are full of cripples it has made.  The hill-sides of Syria are riddled with holes, where miserable hermits, whose lives it had palsied, lived and died like the vermin they harbored.  Our libraries are crammed with books written by spiritual hypochondriacs, who inspected all their moral secretions a dozen times a day.  They are full of interest, but they should be transferred from the shelf of the theologian to that of the medical man who makes a study of insanity.

This was the state into which too much work and too much responsibility were bringing Helen Darley, when the new master came and lifted so much of the burden that was crushing her as must be removed before she could have a chance to recover her natural elasticity and buoyancy.  Many of the noblest women, suffering like her, but less fortunate in being relieved at the right moment, die worried out of life by the perpetual teasing of this inflamed, neuralgic conscience.  So subtile is the line which separates the true and almost angelic sensibility of a healthy, but exalted nature, from the soreness of a soul which is sympathizing with a morbid state of the body that it is no wonder they are often confounded.  And thus many good women are suffered to perish by that form of spontaneous combustion in which the victim goes on toiling day and night with the hidden fire consuming her, until all at once her cheek whitens, and, as we look upon her, she drops away, a heap of ashes.  The more they overwork themselves, the more exacting becomes the sense of duty,—­as the draught of the locomotive’s furnace blows stronger and makes the fire burn more fiercely, the faster it spins along the track.

It is not very likely, as was said at the beginning of this chapter, that we shall trouble ourselves a great deal about the internal affairs of the Apollinean Institute.  These schools are, in the nature of things, not so very unlike each other as to require a minute description for each particular one among them.  They have all very much the same general features, pleasing and displeasing.  All feeding-establishments have something odious about them,—­from the wretched country-houses where paupers are farmed out to the lowest bidder, up to the commons-tables at colleges and even the fashionable boarding-house.  A person’s appetite should be at war with no other purse than his own.  Young people, especially, who have a bone-factory at work in them, and have to feed the living looms of innumerable growing tissues, should be provided for, if possible, by those who love them like their own flesh and blood.  Elsewhere their appetites will be sure to make them enemies, or, what are almost as bad, friends whose interests are at variance with the claims of their exacting necessities and demands.