Page:The Fate of Fenella (1892).djvu/239

 looked into space and warbled the music of Faust's love scene. Here was a woman driven mad by the bad man who had deserted her, whose hair had turned gray in her long imprisonment, but who ever since wept tears all day over the love letters thrust into her bosom and reduced to a pulp with much weeping. Here was the man who believed he had a millstone on his head; here the woman who was convinced that every means was being taken to accomplish her dishonor; out they all came, mumbling, maundering, making faces at one another, pulling and picking at one another's coat sleeves, defiant, blasphemous, hysterical, howling, and weeping, men and women cursing, men and women rending the air with their piteous cries. Men glared at him with features distorted with rage, women hissed at him with lips polluted with blasphemies. It was enough to make anyone mad to talk to them. This was no home for the afflicted. It was a veritable hell upon earth.

The worst of it was that there was no humane desire to cure the insane. In public institutions they attempt to cure, too often in private homes they do not hesitate to kill the last vestige of reason. The doctors, instead of soothing their patients, irritated them. The mad point was not avoided, it was insisted upon. The consequence was that the wards, comparatively quiet before the medical attendants went their rounds, became