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“‘That is all very well for you to say,’ I replied, my feelings of indignation almost boiling over, ‘but if you had the operation to bear, you would find it a good deal worse than a bad toothache, or the severest pain you ever suffered in your life.’

“Even this was turned into sport. I never saw such a woman. I believe she would have laughed in a cholera hospital. I left, assuring Mrs. N–of my deepest sympathies, and urged her to nerve herself for the sad trial to which she was so soon to be subjected. I was not present when the operation was performed, but one who attended all through the fearful scene gave me a minute description of every thing that occurred.”

The thought of hearing the details of a dreadful operation made me sick at heart, and yet I felt a morbid desire to know all about it. I could not ask my visitor to pause; and yet I dreaded to hear her utter another sentence. Such was the strange disorder of my feelings! But it mattered not what process of thought was going on in my mind, or what was the state of my feelings; my visitor went steadily on with her story, while every fifth word added a beat to my pulse per minute.

The effect of this detail was to increase all the cancerous symptoms in my breast, or to cause me to imagine that they were increased. When my husband came home, I was in a sad state of nervous excitement. He anxiously inquired the cause.

“My breast feels much worse than it has felt for a long time,” said I. “I am sure a cancer is forming. I have all the symptoms.”

“Do you know the symptoms?” he asked.

“Mrs. N–had a cancer in her breast, and my symptoms all resemble hers.”

“How do you know?”

“Mrs. A–has been here, and she is quite intimate with Mrs. N–. All my symptoms, she says, are precisely like hers.”

“I wish Mrs. A–was in the deserts of Arabia!” said my husband, in a passion. “Even if what she said were true, what business had she to say it? Harm, not good, could come of it. But I don’t believe you have any more cancer in your breast than I have. There is an obstruction and hardening of the glands, and that is about all.”

“But Mrs. N–‘s breast was just like mine, for Mrs. A–says so. She described the feeling Mrs. N–had, and mine is precisely like it.”

“Mrs. A–neither felt the peculiar sensation in Mrs. N–‘s breast nor in yours; and, therefore, cannot know that they are alike. She is an idle, croaking gossip, and I wish she would never cross our threshold. She always does harm.”

I felt that she had done me harm, but I wouldn’t say so. I was a good deal vexed at the way my husband treated the matter, and accused him of indifference as to whether I had a cancer or not. He bore the accusation very patiently, as, indeed, he always does any of my sudden ebullitions of feeling. He knows my weakness.

“If I thought there were danger,” he mildly said, “I would be as much troubled as you are.”

“As to danger, that is imminent enough,” I returned, fretfully.

“On the contrary, I am satisfied that there is none. One of your symptoms makes this perfectly clear.”

“Indeed! What symptom?” I eagerly asked.

“Your terrible fears of a cancer are an almost certain sign that you will never have one. The evil we most fear, rarely, if ever, falls upon us.”

“That is a very strange way to talk,” I replied.

“But a true way, nevertheless,” said my husband.

“I can see no reason in it. Why should we be troubled to death about a thing that is never going to happen?”

“The trouble is bad enough, without the reality, I suppose. We are all doomed to have a certain amount of anxiety and trouble here, whether real or imaginary. Some have the reality, and others the imagination. Either is bad enough; I don’t know which is worse.”