“I mean that I don’t believe there is in human beings anything mysterious which can live unless the body is living, anything that doesn’t die simultaneously with the body.  Of course there is something that we call mental, that likes and dislikes, loves and hates, and so on.”

“And cannot that something be depressed by misfortune?”

“I did not say I had had any misfortune.”

“Nor did I say so.  Let us put it this way then—­cannot that something be depressed?”

“To a certain degree, of course.  But keep your body in perfect health, and you ought to be immune from extreme depression.  And I believe you are immune.  Frankly, Doctor Meyer Isaacson, I don’t think you are right.  I am sure something is out of order in my body.  There must be some pressure somewhere, some obscure derangement of the nerves, something radically wrong.”

“Try another doctor.  Try a nerve specialist—­a hypnotist, if you like:  Hinton Morris, Scalinger, or Powell Burnham; I fear I cannot help you.”

“So it seems.”

She got up slowly.  And still her movements were careless, but always full of a grace that was very individual.

“Remember,” she said, “that I have spoken to you so frankly in your capacity as a physician.”

“All I hear in this room I forget when I am out of it.”

“Truly?” she said.

“At any rate, I forget to speak of it,” he said, rather curtly.

“Good-bye,” she rejoined.

She left him with a strange sensation, of the hopelessness that comes from greed and acute worldliness, uncombined with any, even subconscious, conception of other possibilities than purely material ones.

What could such a woman have to look forward to at this period of her life?

Doctor Isaacson was thinking about this now.  He remained always perfectly motionless in his arm-chair, but he had abandoned the attempt to discipline his mind.  He knew that to-day his brain would not repose with his limbs, and he no longer desired his usual rest-cure.  He preferred to think—­about Mrs. Chepstow.

She had made upon him a powerful impression.  He recalled the look in her eyes when she had said that she was thirty-eight, a look that had seemed to command him to believe her.  He had not believed her, yet he had no idea what her real age was.  Only he knew that it was not thirty-eight.  How determined she was not to suffer, to get through life—­her one life, as she thought it—­without distress!  And she was suffering.  He divined why.  That was not difficult.  She was “in low water.”  The tides of pleasure were failing.  And she had nothing to cling to, clever woman though she was.

Why did he think her clever?

He asked himself that question.  He was not a man to take cleverness on trust.  Mrs. Chepstow had not said anything specially brilliant.  In her materialism she was surely short-sighted, if not blind.  She had made a mess of her life.  And yet he knew that she was a clever woman.