It is mainly through unaccustomed silence that your nerves are made
trim again. Usually, you are giving out in talk all that you receive
through your senses of perception. Keep silence now. Its gold will
accumulate in you at compound interest. You will realise the joy of
being full of reflections and ideas. You will begin to hoard them
proudly, like a miser. You will gloat over your own cleverness--you,
who but a few days since, were feeling so stupid. Solitude in a crowd,
silence among chatterboxes--these are the best ministers to a mind
diseased. And with the restoration of the mind, the body will be
restored too. You, who were physically so limp and pallid, will be a
ruddy Hercules now. And when, at the moment of departure, you pass
through the hall, shyly distributing to the servants that largesse
which is so slight in comparison with what your doctor and nurse (or
nurses) would have levied on you, you will feel that you are more than
fit to resume that burden of personality whereunder you had sunk. You
will be victoriously yourself again.

Yet I think you will look back a little wistfully on the period of
your obliteration. People--for people are very nice, really, most of
them--will tell you that they have missed you. You will reply that you
did not miss yourself. And you will go the more strenuously to your
work and pleasure, so as to have the sooner an excuse for a good
riddance.


A STUDY IN DEJECTION

Riderless the horse was, and with none to hold his bridle. But he
waited patiently, submissively, there where I saw him, at the shabby
corner of a certain shabby little street in Chelsea. `My beautiful, my