The flattering
comparison of himself with Dr Charbon had an oddly stimulating effect
upon him, notwithstanding that it had been uttered by he knew not
whom,--a mere _vox et praeterea nihil_. He disclaimed to himself the
truth of the comparison, but all the same he was encouraged to bend his
attention with his utmost force to the solution of his difficult
problem--what to do to rouse his patient?
He sat thus, amid the bustle and buzz of the restaurant, the coming and
going of waiters, completely abstracted, assailing his difficulty with
questions on this side and on that,--when suddenly out of the mists that
obscured it there rose upon his mental vision an idea, which appealed to
him as a solution of the whole, and, more than that, as a secret that
would revolutionise all the treatment of nervous weakness and
derangement. How came the idea? How do ideas ever come? As inspirations,
we say, or as revelations; and truly they come upon us with such amazing
and inspiriting freshness, that they may well be called either the one
or the other. But no great idea had ever yet an epiphany but from the
ferment of more familiar small ideas,--just as the glorious Aphrodite
was born of the ferment and pother of the waves of the sea.
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