"What you must know, of cours Minna replied, "but Doctor C whose advice you are put in charg brother's case, had the impertin question the sanity of our dear gi ents and even to discuss with me diseases which I hope we shall r to mention to-day." one cross that she has to bear is a persis- I must know if I am to sa tent and (seemingly) incorrigible rising of brother." stomachic gas during and immediately after her meals. She overcomes her volcanic malady by a deep filling of the lungs, a deep depression of the chin, the pressure of the first two fingers of the left hand against firmly closed lips, and the very faintest enunciation of the syllable "ub." To be sure, the rite makes for rather brutal interruptions in her conversation, but there is nothing intrinsically violent about it. It gives her, on the contrary, quite the air of pronouncing a solemn benediction upon her wayward gastronomical eccentricity. This, Adams (during his first amused half hour at Miss Minna's tea-table) observed for himself; though Miss Minna is not one to hold back autobiographically. She talks impressively and incessantly on any topic in which she feels a personal proprietorship, and she has no regard whatever for the more vulgar observances of bourgeois tact. "I oleways have such difficulty in taking a specialist seriously," she said, speaking in the tensely aristocratic manner of her kind, exploding her vowels as far down in her alimentary canal as she could possibly lower them. "A specialist seems to me not so much of a doctor as a collector who looks upon his patients as though they were so many objets dug up in the South Sea or fetched heome from abrawd to be catilawgued. I dare say, though, that you think of your nerves and brains and psychological experiments quite as though they were really medical. I must remember to call you doctor. I oleways have the same difficulty remembering what to call my dentist. Adams waived the title, saying that it made very little difference what she called him so that she talked freely to him and answered his questions without restraint. Miss Minna performed her exquisitely sacerdotal rite as above described, overcame the regurgitation, and eyed him coldly. "I fear," she rejoined, "that I shall never be able to understand the morbid curiosity of the modern practitioner." "Alas!" cried Adams. "Then you must bear with me as best you can, for without g "Clay passed all that informa to me, Miss Kinkead," said Adan there is no need to cover the second time. I am prepared with you-and so disagree with over the importance of the heredity in the particular solutio seeking. I am afraid, however, may find my inquiries even mor ing than Doctor Clay's." "I will hear them, at least," s Minna. "And answer them quite på They will be searching, you see, a mate. One never knows what m bearing upon so baffling a pro your brother's illness.... Adam forward in his eagerness, he told quite appealed to her. It is a and no mistake, that air of boyish tion that comes over him when o precious neurotics interests him m usual. "After all," he conclu have come all the way from New see . . "What?" snapped Miss Minn drawing from him. "All this," Adams answered, wave of his blandly unabashed She looked warily surprised. is it you want to know?" she as "Everything," Adams replied erything that you can possibly about your brother's marriage to wife." When Adams told me first ab kead I found myself strangely throes of a rising animosity aga man. This, of course, explain with my recollection of his mar had seen his wife during my coll and managed to meet her, too, year Kinkead married her. I self, as college boys do, very mu to save your Adams leaned he told me, and It is appealing of boyish absorp when one of his ts him more than concluded, "I ɔm New York to ss Minna, with 1swered, with a bashed hand. prised. "What she asked. replied. "Evpossibly tell me riage to his late 1 popular actress. I could tell Adams, who had not been so fortunate as I, all about her. She was small and chiselled and she had a wild elegance and a gentility of charm, together. She was like a cameo sometimes, and sometimes like a crystal statuette. Not hard, though. Her beauty, for all the cleanness of its edges, was too flowerlike to be hard. She made you think of the lady in the nursery rhyme who will have music wherever she goes. Music was Ellen Steele's due wherever she went. She was herself so strangely like music. She came from London, I believe, from what is called "old theatrical stock." One never knew much about her. Those were the transition days between the theatre of the old school and our playground for press agents and sex appeal. The outside world would have held few fetishes for Ellen Steele. She would, I think, have harked back to the great departed goddesses, done her work hard, and slept soundly after. She would have had little time and less thought for beau monde or fourth estate. I fancy the impresarios of her day captured her to make Shakespeare profitable. I saw her Beatrice and her Viola. Many years afterward my roommate (for this part is a college memoir) named his daughter Juliet in her honor, even though he never met her as I did. New York loved her for three winters. At the end of the third she went on tour. She got no further than Boston. There, while she was playing Juliet, she met Kinkead and married him. She announced that her marriage would not in anywise interrupt her career, but she never acted again. She died a year ago, ageless as such women should be, after sixteen years of marriage. Why do "such women" do it? When an actress marries-there is a difference, isn't there, between an actress and a woman merely on the stage?-it is as though some one had plucked a rose in the garden and stuck it in a vase. They are defenseless creatures, I think, such women; in a strange way, quite like flowers. Unlike flowers, too, I grant you. There isn't much fanaticism about a Aom seems a special kind of fanaticism, a passive kind, that permits, rather than seeks, obsession by a single-minded emotion. And, once obsessed, the very passivity is galvanized into a force capable of leaping the gap between its source and its-well, its audience. As electric current leaps the unwired spaces between tower and tower. . . . But so easily, so very easily destroyed, too. . . quite like flowers. . . . Ellen Steele, now. She bloomed to be enjoyed, if ever woman did, and then came the man who could not enjoy her without cutting her off from all that gave her life. He might have made her happy, you say? But did he? He hardly consulted her about the vase in which she was to sink so safely and forlornly to oblivion. She came to live in the Boston house in Marlborough Street with her husband and his sister (who, of course, continued to manage everything just as she always had), and summers she went to the farm at Phipps's Crossing and watched the historical pageant and, after sixteen years of that, she died with no more issue than the faint echo of a voice and the vague shadow of a gesture to move through a generation's memories of Beatrice and Viola and Juliet. . . . "It turned out far better than we expected." So Miss Minna to Adams, concluding what, together with my own reminiscence and rumination, I have just summarized. "She was a gentle thing, not unamenable, and, though she had no background of any sort, her natural adaptability really made things quite easy. Of course, very few people called at first, but I made the best of things. One must make the best of things, if they are humanly possible, don't you think? When George steadfastly refused to put her aside-and, I must say, I did not myself greatly like the idea of divorce-I was clever enough to point out to our friends the difference between a Shakespearian actress and the ordinary theatrical person. Eventually every one had to recognize her undeniable charm. There were moments in the first year or two when a dreadful manager used to come from New York. in her profession. Afterward she would cry unaccountably. She wanted children. That was natural, I know. But George, in spite of his rare self-control, is a nervous man really. He has not the temperament for children. He had me explain the situation to her, and, I must say, she behaved very reasonably and put it out of her head entirely. And George never for a moment tolerated her returning to the stage, even as an amateur when societies invited her to join with them in their private theatricals. George can be enormously firm. She realized that and made very little difficulty, even though she never wholly understood our point of view. Her people were actors, to be sure. They must often have clouded the issue for her. I'm afraid that she always a little resented George's feeling. She owed me consideration, too. I took every care from her shoulders. Poor child, I had to! She was never in any way fitted to manage George's house. Why, the last time I went abroad she upset things so and moved things so about that George had to cable me to return post-haste. After that she never again tried to interfere. She took up playground work in one of the missions. A good many people were doing it and, though both George and I felt that Ellen should always be very careful, still we saw no harm in it. And there George did allow her to supervise a little theatre of some kind where the children acted in Shakespeare's plays. It filled her days she had absolutely no social gift-and I have been given to understand that some of the performances were quite good." "And her death," Adams put in, "-sudden as that was, it must have come as a great shock to your brother?" Miss Minna stiffened. "Of course. A great shock to all of us. Of course to my brother. He loved his wife very dearly. He had made her an ideal husband. No one could deny that." The nurse came down about that time (I am paraphrasing Adams's account of the case, you understand) to say that Mr. Kinkead was awake and would see the doctor. Miss Minna rose to hope that "Mister-ub-Doctor Adams had learned something which might prove valuable in Adams had one final point t "Such a shock," he suggested, shock as might account for your present serious and puzzling con "I presume that you refer stil Ellen's death?" Miss Minna "You should be able to answe than I, doctor. After all, El nearly a year ago and this strange began long after." "After some months of selfAdams observed. "They would a quite a total of nervous strain." Miss Minna stiffened. "A ma sane," she remarked, "even al death of his wife. Doctor Clay c no evidence of abnormal strain b present business began, and Doc is not only our regular physician intimate friend as well. He that the strangest element in the my brother's extraordinary cal brother is a very sane man, Adams." Adams did not trouble to a puzzle. He turned it over in and let it whet his psychiatric Then, thanking Miss Minna, he that he had better see his patient Accounting for the season of it will have been well on towa when Kinkead awoke that day a fied his willingness to be intervi his doctor. Adams found him in ping cocoa in lieu of tannic st wearing a quilted blue smokingprotect his roundly fattened s from the weather of the cit weather is never quite unint Adams described the look in his that of a cherub, injured; one of el's, perhaps, out of the Sistine, to sell matches on a street corne Most men take illness angrily few gain sweetness, kindliness, mility from illness. Many fall drums of self-pity. Kinkead curiously detached from himself to look at his case as a dog star unfamiliar without any enlighten tal reaction to tell him what it "Small wonder!" Adams comme porting to me. Vinkead omitted greetings on ggested, "such a of self-control," "A man can be 'even about the or Clay could find strain before this and Doctor Clay physician but our 1. He admitted it in the case was nary calm. My e man, Doctor She came to live in the Boston house in Marlborough Street with her husband and his sister.-Page 67. night," he said. "One of them bruised get deeper this time than we have yet if my wrist. See?" we're going to stop this business. I'm He held the plump. pearly member un thinking thera mau still ha a fam thin- in my life before this started. I can't get up now. The only real sleep I have is in the day." "We might wonder why nothing happens in the daytime," said Adams. "Let's just be thankful for the respite and let it go at that. We might even turn your office force around," he added, "so that you could work nights and sleep days like a night watchman." Kinkead, past joking (one surmises that he never made great progress at it), shook his head with mournful seriousness. "I should have nothing to do in the office at night," he explained. "The Stock Exchange wouldn't be open. You couldn't persuade the Stock Exchange to turn it self inside out for one man.' "I suppose not," said Adams. Adams had thought out an entire new series of questions for the searching of Kinkead's subconsciousness. "There it is," Adams says, speaking of that curiously unexplorable mental wilderness, "like a lock in a river. If you can make it work for you, you go on sailing upstream quite simply. I'm perpetually trying to get up and back into the mind's weir, it seems to me. Only I fail so often and accomplish nothing more than a little springing of the weir gates to let a little more of the mind's backwaters run down into the lock and lift things a bit. You've got to get the gates open. Those forgotten waters, if you leave them to their own natural leakage, make so much trouble. If only we psychiatrists could once and for all get them under control so that we could open the lock gates wide every so often for every mind.' He had determined to pry loose some sort of boyhood association with the dark which would explain this amazing behavior of the mature Kinkead. He was trying to make Kinkead admit that once, even once, his child's sleep had been terrified to wakefulness. . . "Kinkead doesn't hold a thing back from me," he complained afterward. "I'm confident of that. And yet I can get nowhere with him. He's so perfectly frank and so perfectly stupid. I don't believe that anything has ever really upset him. I don't believe that anything mind has any of that subconsc water or hinterland, if you like metaphor, upon which you and I our temperaments and our ins As for his conscience, I have nev easier." Only at the end of the hour di by the merest chance, come ba upon the topic of the dead wife. her last photograph, recklessly e silver, youth and glory faded int image of Indian summer. "Mrs. Kinkead, I suppose? marked. "My poor Ellen," said Kinke would have been a great comfo now. She read aloud so beauti her reading would have made m "She was a great actress in Adams observed. "Ah," said Kinkead. "She over that. She was a sweet an wife. That's something more, doctor?" "Something else, at any rate, replied. Adams dined with the brother ter, and enjoyed his dinner, played chess afterward with the while the sister read the Transcr to herself without making an about it. At ten, on Adams's or kead went to bed. At ten-thirty Adams bade Mi good-night, assured her that he h thing he needed and went to h At a quarter to eleven the nur him. He made certain that M na's retirement was well under v a prayer for brother George and poor Ellen, too, I dare say" took up his watch. "It began at eleven-thirty," he and I shall transcribe his own with absolute fidelity. "It was business altogether. He was a his right side, sound asleep and b deeply and quickly like a dog. Th ing came, of course, from my prescription. I saw him sit up suddenly as though some one ha him, and he brought his hands with a report that fairly frighte It all happened exactly as he had |