"
"I believe you, Madam, on my sacred honor I do!" said Traverse,
fervently.
"And yet you could get no one about this place to believe you! They
have taken my brother-in-law's false story, indorsed as it is by the
doctor-proprietor, for granted. And just so long as I persist in
telling my true story, they will consider me a monomaniac, and so
often as the thought of my many wrongs and sorrows combines with the
nervous irritability to which every woman is occasionally subject,
and makes me rave with impatience and excitement, they will report
me a dangerous lunatic, subject to periodical attacks of violent
frenzy; but, young man, even at my worst, I am no more mad than any
other woman, wild with grief and hysterical through nervous
irritation, might at any time become without having her sanity
called in question."
"I am sure that you are not, nor ever could have been, Madam. The
nervous excitement of which you speak is entirely within the control
of medicine, which mania proper is not. You will use the means that
I prescribe and your continued calmness will go far to convince even
these dullards that they have been wrong."
"I will do everything you recommend; indeed, for some weeks before
you came, I had put a constraint upon myself and forced myself to be
very still; but the effect of that was, that acting upon their
theory they said that I was sinking into the last or 'melancholy-
mad' state of mania, and they put me in here with the incurables.
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