The Bird’s Nest by Shirley Jackson Read Free Book Online Page B

go on together; I am a whimsical man and must have my smile)—naturally, because they grew old along with me, and I survived ’em, being a medical man.
    Thackeray says somewhere (and I had my finger on it not two days ago, somewhere in
Esmond,
anyway) that a man’s vanity is stronger than any other passion in him; I’ve read that twenty times and more in as many years, and I daresay a good writer is much the same as a good doctor; honest, decent, self-respecting men, with no use for fads or foibles, going on trying to make our sensible best of the material we get, and all of it no better and no worse than human nature, and who can quarrel with that for durable cloth? And yet, along with Thackeray, I have my prides and my little passions, and perhaps fancying myself Author is not the least of them.
    With all of this, there wasn’t much joking in me the first time I met Miss R., poor girl. Ryan had made the appointment for her, and, to tell the truth, I wasn’t much inclined to her at first, thought her a sullen type, perhaps. Young women who fancy “character-reading” or “fortune-telling” might have thought her shy. Colorless was a word came to my mind when I looked at her. She had brown hair, taken smoothly to the back of her head, and fastened there with strong combs or a bit of ribbon, maybe; brown eyes, hands long and graceful and quiet when she sat down, not fussing with her gloves or her pocketbook like these nervous women; altogether, if I may be permitted a term which has got sadly out of use, I thought Miss R. a gentlewoman. Her gown was suitable for her age and position; dark, neatly made and not at all stylish, perhaps even—although I liked it, I recall—a bit prim. Her voice was low and level, and I thought her cultured. I cannot recall that she ever laughed genuinely, although when she came to know me she frequently smiled.
    Miss R.’s symptoms—dizzy spells, occasional
aboulia,
* periods of forgetfulness, panic, fears and weaknesses which were causing her to function poorly at her employment, listlessness, insomnia—all indications of a highly nervous condition, perhaps of an hysteric, had been faithfully reported to me by that amiable blackguard Ryan, to whom her family had taken her when her state became too apparent to be ignored; like most families, the members of this one—in this particular case, I believe, only a middle-aged aunt—chose to overlook the obvious symptoms of nervousness in the patient, and excuse them variously and charitably until the case was too far advanced to be dismissed; I know of one family where it was not until a lad had made off with some thousands of dollars from his father’s safe that his doting family confessed that he had been a sleepwalker since childhood! At any rate, Ryan, finding himself at a loss with regard to Miss R. when she did not respond to his usual treatments (nerve tonic, sedatives, rest in the afternoon), and knowing of my own interest in the deep problems of the mind (although, as I cannot say often enough, I am not one of your psychoanalysts, but merely an honest general practitioner who believes that the illnesses of the mind are as reasonable as the illnesses of the body, and that your analytical nastiness has no place in the thoughts of a decent and modest girl like Miss R.) he arranged with me to give her an appointment.
    Miss Hartley, my nurse, had taken down the name of the patient, her address, age, and such vital information, and the card bearing these facts was set upon my desk when Miss R. entered. *
    She smiled at me almost timidly as she sat down; my office is so constructed as to display the maximum reassurance to timid patients—something your chromium and enamel physicians seem to regard as superfluous—and its dark rows of books (from my school days, madam; I admit it before you charge me) against the walls, its heavily curtained windows (enriched, my dear miss,