112 MARRIAGE AND DISEASE. 



finds himself, but his load of responsibility is generally 

 lightened by the knowledge that his dictum is not 

 final ; that most of his clients have appealed to him in 

 the hope that his verdict may be favourable, and with 

 a determination already formed to act upon it if it be 

 so, and to disregard it and risk the consequences if it 

 prove the reverse. Too often he is told but half the 

 truth the applicant in too many cases is pleased to 

 deceive himself and his adviser ; and having so gained 

 a favourable decision by fraud, deliberately enters on a 

 course he knows to be studded with dangers ; to live 

 in a fool's paradise until the day of reckoning comes. 

 In some cases it comes very soon, as where the first- 

 born's vacant face is scanned day after day, and the 

 heart sinks as the terrible fact forces itself upon the 

 parent that his child is an idiot ; or where the young 

 wife suddenly loses all that made her godlike, all that 

 made her human, and the husband finds himself with 

 a creature in his arms at which his soul revolts. I 

 have known a lady, young and beautiful, who within a 

 month of her marriage was an inmate of a lunatic 

 asylum, and who, though years have since passed, has 

 not recovered, and in all probability will never return 

 to home and husband. 



But in many cases the evil day does not arrive until 

 middle life ; and then, when the fear once felt has worn 

 away, when the deception practised has faded from 

 the memory, and the grave admonition of the physician 

 is forgotten, the son in whom the father hoped to live 

 again, the girl on whom the mother's heart is set, is 



