I was
eager to get to business and find relief, but she was distressingly
deliberate. She unpinned and unhooked and uncoupled her upholsteries
one by one, abolished the wrinkles with a flirt of her hand and hung the
articles up; peeled off her gloves and disposed of them, got a book out
of her hand-bag, then drew a chair to the bedside, descended into it
without hurry, and I hung out my tongue. She said, with pity but without
passion:

'Return it to its receptacle. We deal with the mind only, not with its
dumb servants.'

I could not offer my pulse, because the connection was broken; but she
detected the apology before I could word it, and indicated by a negative
tilt of her head that the pulse was another dumb servant that she had no
use for. Then I thought I would tell her my symptoms and how I felt, so
that she would understand the case; but that was another inconsequence,
she did not need to know those things; moreover, my remark about how I
felt was an abuse of language, a misapplication of terms--

'One does not feel,' she explained; 'there is no such thing as
feeling: therefore, to speak of a non-existent thing as existent as a
contradiction. Matter has no existence; nothing exists but mind; the
mind cannot feel pain, it can only imagine it.'

'But if it hurts, just the same--'

'It doesn't. A thing which is unreal cannot exercise the functions of
reality. Pain is unreal; hence pain cannot hurt.'

In making a sweeping gesture to indicate the act of shooing the illusion
of pain out of the mind, she raked her hand on a pin in her dress, said
'Ouch!' and went tranquilly on with her talk. 'You should never allow
yourself to speak of how you feel, nor permit others to ask you how
you are feeling: you should never concede that you are ill, nor permit
others to talk about disease or pain or death or similar non-existences
in your preserve. Such talk only encourages the mind to continue its
empty imaginings.' Just at that point the Stubenmadchen trod on the
cat's tail, and the cat let fly a frenzy of cat-profanity. I asked with
caution:

'Is a cat's opinion about pain valuable?'

'A cat has no opinion; opinions proceed from the mind only; the lower
animals, being eternally perishable, have not been granted mind; without
mind opinion is impossible.'

'She merely imagined she felt a pain--the cat?'

'She cannot imagine a pain, for imagination is an effect of mind;
without mind, there is no imagination. A cat