A curious apathy seemed to have taken possession of this resolute woman.

Forced to speak first, the Doctor merely inquired, in the conventional phrase, what he could do for her.
The sound of his voice seemed to rouse her.

Still looking straight at the light, she said abruptly: 'I have a painful question to ask.' 'What is it ?' Her eyes travelled slowly from the window to the Doctor's face.
Without the slightest outward appearance of agitation, she put the 'painful question' in these extraordinary words: 'I want to know, if you please, whether I am in danger of going mad ?' Some men might have been amused, and some might have been alarmed.
Doctor Wybrow was only conscious of a sense of disappointment.

Was this the rare case that he had anticipated, judging rashly by appearances?
Was the new patient only a hypochondriacal woman, whose malady was a disordered stomach and whose misfortune was a weak brain?
'Why do you come to me ?' he asked sharply.

'Why don't you consult a doctor whose special employment is the treatment of the insane ?' She had her answer ready on the instant.
'I don't go to a doctor of that sort,' she said, 'for the very reason that he is a specialist: he has the fatal habit of judging everybody by lines and rules of his own laying down.