1911. Illustrated. The book begins: Kate, My Dear, Has a great surgeon ever prescribed you as a sedative? Were you ever regarded, in a perfectly calm, dispassionate, scientific way, as a benign substitute for drugs, more somnific than bromides and less dangerously seductive than morphine? And as such, have you ever found yourself suddenly and intimately involved in the treatment of a man with whom your previous acquaintance had been entirely official and impersonal? Because that is what has just happened to me, and serious as the situation seems to be, I am unable to convince myself of its reality. To me it is alternately either a farce or a nightmare, and it seems at all times wholly without reason or precedent, at once too tragical, too ridiculous, and too utterly preposterous to be true.