This explains how it was so easy for microbophobia to get firm hold of the professor in after days. After taking the degree of doctor of philosophy, he was called to a university chair, where, being still in a state of impaired vitality, he suffered from a recrudescence of _methoditis_, which left him so weak that without resistance he fell a prey to microbophobia in the very first year, the immediate cause of infection being without doubt his association with various of his faculty brethren who were in the school of medicine, or worked in the bacteriological laboratory and lectured on sanitation, or served on the university committee of hygiene. All of these men, he afterward learned, were in various stages of the disease--though all considered themselves in perfect health.
For one of the worst things about microbophobia is that the victim has no suspicion of the real nature of his ailment; more than that, he falls a prey to the strange hallucination that it is his environment, and not himself, which is the seat of infection, and consequently will not listen to diagnosis. Individuals have been known to advance in the malady until the _sensus communis_ was all but absolutely gone, without realizing the gravity of their condition.
The professor might have gone on for some time; for, though he was in the grip of the disease, he had not yet begun to suffer, owing to a good constitution inherited from sound progenitors who were not university bred. But an event occurred which hastened the progress of his malady. He married.
Now, marrying is ordinarily a good thing for the _sensus communis_. Many sufferers of both sexes have found it a most efficacious remedy for the ailments of that rather uncertain organ. But it so happened that the professor's alliance was with a member of the Woman's Club, who was also college bred, a possessor of the degree of Mistress of Home Economics, and, unfortunately, already infected with microbophobia, and visibly impaired in health. Some of his bachelor friends had warned him that conditions in that part of town were notorious, but he laughed at them, and said that a little fumigation was the worst that could happen.
The gravest fears of the professor's friends, however, were soon realized. They saw him begin to sink before their eyes. In his low state of vitality, he was soon hopelessly in the clutches of the dread malady. Even if he had not been vitally reduced, his case would have been desperate, for his wife continued to expose herself week after week at the club. And besides, she took several Health Journals, all of which came from infected centers, and which not only she, but the professor himself, handled with all the carelessness of immunes. The professor read at first because he was amused, but it was not long before he, as well as his wife, hovered with almost religious devotion over the column headed Sanitas Sanitatum, by Doctor Septic Septington, which he ought to have known was swarming with _bacillus microbophobicus_.