Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/41

 eyes of an eager and willing animal that could not understand a word he said.

He carried her back to the bed, but he could not make her lie on the pillow. She curled up on her side, her knees drawn up, her hands closed like paws, her head down, blinking at him, shivering, and whining gratefully when he touched her. He began to walk up and down the room.

He was not ignorant enough to suppose that she had merely gone insane. He was sufficiently acquainted with the theories of morbid psychology to understand that in her hysterical state she had, so to speak, hypnotized herself with the recurring thought, "If I had been a dog!" until she imagined that she had become one. Or, to use the fashionable idiom of our Freudian day, in her need to escape from the killing worries of her shame and destitution she had taken refuge in a loss of identity and become a dog subconsciously.

All of that did not help Carey. What was he to do? He could call a policeman and send her on her way to the psychopathic ward in Bellevue and thence to the lunatic-asylum. But if she had really been a dog would he turn her out? He had let his mother die in an asylum. (Or so he put it to himself. He had not known of it till after she was dead.) And the thought had been, for years, a horror and a remorse to him. He could not do it again.