"
"Ah, bah; my excellent, my admirable, my inexperienced young friend,
that is all you know of lunatics! With more or less violence of
assertion, they every one insist upon their sanity, just as
criminals protest their innocence. Ah, bah! you shall go into every
cell in this ward and find not one lunatic among them," sneered the
old doctor, as he led the way into the next little room.
It was indeed as he had foretold, and Traverse Rocke found himself
deeply affected by the melancholy, the earnest and sometimes the
violent manner in which the poor unfortunates protested their sanity
and implored or demanded to be restored to home and friends.
"You perceive," said the doctor, with a dry laugh, "that they are
none of them crazy?"
"I see," said Traverse, "but I also detect a very great difference
between that lovely woman in the south cell and these other
inmates."
"Bah! bah! bah! She is more beautiful, more accomplished, more
refined than the others, and she is in one of her lucid intervals!
That is all; but as to a difference between her insanity and that of
the other patients, it lies in this, that she is the most hopelessly
mad of the whole lot! She has been mad eighteen years!"
"Is it possible?" exclaimed Traverse, incredulously.
"She lost her reason at the age of sixteen, and she is now thirty-
four; you can calculate!"
"It is amazing and very sorrowful! How beautiful she is!"
"Yes; her beauty was a fatal gift.
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