the time when I was
Medical Officer at the prison here. An educated criminal is almost
invariably an inveterate egotist. We are all interesting to
ourselves--but the more vile we are, the more intensely we are absorbed
in ourselves. The very people who have, logically speaking, the most
indisputable interest in concealing their crimes, are also the very
people who, almost without exception, yield to the temptation of looking
at themselves in the pages of a Diary."

"I don't doubt your experience, doctor. But your results puzzle me."

"Think a little, Mr. David, and you will not find the riddle so very hard
to read. The better we are, the more unselfishly we are interested in
others. The worse we are, the more inveterately our interest is
concentrated on ourselves. Look at your aunt as an example of what I say.
This morning there were some letters waiting for her, on the subject of
those reforms in the treatment of mad people, which she is as resolute as
ever to promote--in this country as well as in England. It was with the
greatest difficulty that I prevailed on her not to answer those letters
just yet: in other words, not to excite her brain and nervous system,
after such an ordeal as she has just passed through. Do you think a
wicked woman--with letters relating merely to the interests of other
people waiting for her--would have stood in any need of my interference?
Not she! The wicked woman would have thought only of herself, and would
have been far too much interested in her own recovery to run the risk of
a relapse. Open that book of Madame Fontaine's at any of the later
entries. You will find the miserable woman self-betrayed in every page."

It was true! Every record of Madame Fontaine's most secret moments,
presented in this narrative, was first found in her Diary.

As an example:--Her Diary records, in the fullest detail, the infernal
ingenuity of the stratagem by which she usurped her title to Mr. Keller's
confidence, as the preserver of his life. "I have only to give him the
Alexander's Wine," she writes, "to make sure, by means of the antidote,
of curing the illness which I have myself produced. After that, Minna's
mother becomes Mr. Keller's guardian angel, and Minna's marriage is a
certainty."

On a later page, she is similarly self described--in Mrs. Wagner's
case--as acting from an exactly opposite motive, in choosing the
Looking-Glass Drops. "They not only kill soonest, and most surely defy
detec