for her in every way as if she were his daughter. It had not occurred to
me that you knew nothing about her living with the Filmores."

He made no further allusion to the fact of my having fainted at the
moment of seeing her, and I would not for the world have told him the
reason: I shrank from the idea of disclosing to any one what might be
regarded as a pitiable peculiarity, most of all from betraying it to my
father, who would have suspected my sanity ever after.

I do not mean to dwell with particularity on the details of my
experience. I have described these two cases at length, because they had
definite, clearly traceable results in my after-lot.

Shortly after this last occurrence--I think the very next day--I began to
be aware of a phase in my abnormal sensibility, to which, from the
languid and slight nature of my intercourse with others since my illness,
I had not been alive before. This was the obtrusion on my mind of the
mental process going forward in first one person, and then another, with
whom I happened to be in contact: the vagrant, frivolous ideas and
emotions of some uninteresting acquaintance--Mrs. Filmore, for
example--would force themselves on my consciousness like an importunate,
ill-played musical instrument, or the loud activity of an imprisoned
insect. But this unpleasant sensibility was fitful, and left me moments
of rest, when the souls of my companions were once more shut out from me,
and I felt a relief such as silence brings to wearied nerves. I might
have believed this importunate insight to be merely a diseased activity
of the imagination, but that my prevision of incalculable words and
actions proved it to have a fixed relation to the mental process in other
minds. But this superadded consciousness, wearying and annoying enough
when it urged on me the trivial experience of indifferent people, became