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Long talk with Agatha and Mrs Marden in the evening about our marriage. We think that the summer vacation (the beginning of it) would be the best time for the wedding. Why should we delay? I grudge even those few months. Still, as Mrs Marden says, there are a good many things to be arranged.

March 28. —Mesmerized again by Miss Penelosa. Experience much the same as before, save that insensibility came on more quickly. See Notebook A for temperature of room, barometric pressure, pulse, and respiration as taken by Professor Wilson.

March 29. —Mesmerized again. Details in Notebook A.

March 30. —Sunday, and a blank day. I grudge any interruption of our experiments. At present they merely embrace the physical signs which go with slight, with complete, and with extreme insensibility. After-wards we hope to pass on to the phenomena of suggestion and of lucidity. Professors have demonstrate
d these things upon women at Nancy, and at the Salpetrière. It will be more convincing when a woman demonstrates it upon a professor, with a second professor as a witness. And that I should be the subject, I the sceptic, the materialist! At least, I have shown that my devotion to science is greater than to my own personal consistency. The eating of our own words is the greatest sacrifice which truth ever requires of us.

My neighbour, Charles Sadler, the handsome young demonstrator of Anatomy, came in this evening to return a volume of Virchow’s Archiveswhich I had lent him. I call him young, but, as a matter of fact, he is a year older than I am.

“I understand, Gilroy,” said he, “that you are being experimented upon by Miss Penelosa.”

“Well,” he went on, when I had acknowledged it, “if I were you, I should not let it go any further. You will think me very impertinent, no doubt, but none the less I feel it to be my duty to advise you to have no more to do with her.”

Of course I asked him why.

“I am so placed that I cannot enter into particulars as freely as I could wish,” said he.”Miss Penelosa is the friend of my friend, and my position is a delicate one. I shall only say this: that I have myself been the subject of some of the woman’s experiments, and that they have left a most unpleasant impression upon my mind.”

He could hardly expect me to be satisfied with that, and I tried hard to get something more definite out of him, but without success. Is it conceivable that he could be jealous at my having superseded him! Or is he one of those men of science who feel personally injured when facts run counter to their preconceived opinions? He cannot seriously suppose that because he has some vague grievance I am, therefore, to abandon a series of experiments which promise to be so fruitful of results. He appeared to be annoyed at the light way in which I treated his shadowy warnings, and we parted with some little coldness on both sides.

March 31. — Mesmerized by Miss P.

April 1. — Mesmerized by Miss P. (Notebook A. )

April 2. — Mesmerized by Miss P. (Sphygmographic chart taken by Professor Wilson. )

April 3. — It is possible that this course of mesmerism may be a little trying to the general constitution. Agatha says that I am thinner and darker under the eyes. I am conscious of a nervous irritability which I had not observed in myself before. The least noise, for example, makes me start, and the stupidity of a student causes me exasperation instead of amusement. Agatha wishes me to stop, but I tell her that every course of study is trying, and that one can never attain a result without paying some price for it. Well she sees the sensation which my forthcoming paper on The Relation Between Mind and Mattermay make, she will understand that it is worth a little nervous wear-and-tear. I should not be surprised if I got my F. R. S. over it.