"I'm sorry," he continued, with a sort of harsh humility.
"Of course we don't talk about it much... but I thought we
all really knew."
"Knew what?"
"Well," answered Moon, "that Beacon House is a certain rather singular
sort of house--a house with the tiles loose, shall we say? Innocent Smith
is only the doctor that visits us; hadn't you come when he called before?
As most of our maladies are melancholic, of course he has to be extra cheery.
Sanity, of course, seems a very bumptious eccentric thing to us.
Jumping over a wall, climbing a tree--that's his bedside manner."
"You daren't say such a thing!" cried Rosamund in a rage.
"You daren't suggest that I--"
"Not more than I am," said Michael soothingly; "not more than the rest of us.
Haven't you ever noticed that Miss Duke never sits still--a notorious sign?
Haven't you ever observed that Inglewood is always washing his hands--
a known mark of mental disease? I, of course, am a dipsomaniac."
"I don't believe you," broke out his companion, not without agitation.
"I've heard you had some bad habits--"
"All habits are bad habits," said Michael, with deadly calm.
"Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down
in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
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