Page:The Bet and Other Stories.djvu/97

Rh instance—even a bad actor could manage, but yours—there's nobody. I envy you, envy you terribly! What am I? What?"

She thinks for a moment, and asks:

"I'm a negative phenomenon, aren't I?"

"Yes," I answer.

"H'm . . . what's to be done then?"

What answer can I give? It's easy to say "Work," or "Give your property to the poor," or "Know yourself," and because it's so easy to say this I don't know what to answer.

My therapeutist colleagues, when teaching methods of cure, advise one "to individualise each particular case." This advice must be followed in order to convince one's self that the remedies recommended in the text-books as the best and most thoroughly suitable as a general rule, are quite unsuitable in particular cases. It applies to moral affections as well.

But I must answer something. So I say:

"You've too much time on your hands, my dear. You must take up something. . . . In fact, why shouldn't you go on the stage again, if you have a vocation."

"I can't."

"You have the manner and tone of a victim. I don't like it, my dear. You have yourself to blame. Remember, you began by getting angry with people and things in general; but you never did anything to improve either of them. You didn't put up a struggle against the evil. You got tired. You're not a victim of the struggle