God knows what else I might have got used to. God knows how long they would have kept me in that place—maybe, years. Maybe as long as poor Miss Wilson: for perhaps she—who knows?—was as sane as I had been, when her brother first put her in. I might be there, today. I still think of that and shudder. I might never have got out; and Mrs Sucksby and Mr Ibbs, and Gentleman, and Maud— where would they be, now?
I think of that, too.
But then, I did get out. Blame Fortune. Fortune''s blind, and works in peculiar ways. Fortune sent Helen of Troy to the Greeks—didn''t
it?—and a prince, to the Sleeping Beauty. Fortune kept me at Dr Christie''s nearly all that summer long; then listen to who it sent me.
This was five or six weeks, I suppose, after they had plunged me—some time in July. Think how stupid I had got by then. The season was still a warm one, and we had all begun to sleep, all the hours of the day. We slept in the mornings, while we waited for the dinner-bell to be rung; and, in the afternoons, you would see ladies all over the drawing-room, dozing, nodding their heads, dribbling into their collars. There was nothing else to do. There was nothing to stay awake for. And sleeping made time pass. I slept as much as anyone. I slept so much that when Nurse Spiller came to our room one morning and said, ''Maud Rivers, you''re to come with me, you''ve a visitor'', they had to wake me up and tell me again; and when they had, I didn''t know what they meant.