"But I doubt very much if we
shall get anything out of them."
"Probably not," said Dr. Martineau.
"After all, what I want is a tonic. I don't see that there is anything
positively wrong with me. A certain lack of energy--"
"Lack of balance," corrected the doctor. "You are wasting energy upon
internal friction."
"But isn't that inevitable? No machine is perfectly efficient. No man
either. There is always a waste. Waste of the type; waste of the
individual idiosyncrasy. This little car, for instance, isn't pulling as
she ought to pull--she never does. She's low in her class. So with
myself; there is a natural and necessary high rate of energy waste.
Moods of apathy and indolence are natural to me. (Damn that omnibus! All
over the road!)"
"We don't deny the imperfection--" began the doctor.
"One has to fit oneself to one's circumstances," said Sir Richmond,
opening up another line of thought.
"We don't deny the imperfection" the doctor stuck to it. "These new
methods of treatment are based on the idea of imperfection. We begin
with that. I began with that last Tuesday...."
Sir Richmond, too, was sticking to his argument. "A man, and for
that matter the world he lives in, is a tangle of accumulations. Your
psychoanalyst starts, it seems to me, with a notion of stripping down
to something fundamental.
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