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I replied with one affirmative for both queries, but pleaded misfortune rather than fault. I knew that I was in serious need of variety, but I had found that the specific he had recommended—the atmosphere of foreign travel—no longer satisfied the demand. On the contrary, it aggravated my distemper, by adding to an already overpowering sense of monotony an impossible desire to fly to the uttermost parts of the earth. Books of travel and my friends’ discussions of their coming journeys merely increased my distress.

“So-o?” said Professor Maturin. “So-o-o?” leaning back in his huge leather chair, and putting his finger and thumb tips together. “Well, I suspected as much, and I fear that I am at least partly to blame for your condition. I prescribed a remedy that you have come to find worse than the disease, and, apparently, you have come at the same time to a new realization of Stevenson’s saying that ‘books are all very well in their way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life’—not that I would be disrespectful to my best friends,” and he smiled at the well-filled shelves which extend around his admirable library.