Explore "The White Cat" by Gelett Burgess on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I called her name involuntarily, I suppose, yet there was in my motive, too, a dim idea that the suggestion might in some way influence her to awaken as Joy, rather than as Edna. I did my best, meanwhile, to assist her to revive, fanning her with a newspaper and chafing her hands.
Long before she came to herself, however, there began a convulsive struggle that was one of the most terrible things I had to witness in all my experience with her. It was as if her two selves were fighting for supremacy, for the possession of her body, which was their battle-field. I could only wait helplessly for that fierce struggle gradually to expend itself in tremblings and in sighs, while I called her again and again, now with a definite idea of hypnotic suggestion. The conflict seemed to go on for a long, long time, though in point of fact it lasted, I think, only a few minutes. At the end, she drew a long, deep breath, relaxed, and opened her eyes. Almost immediately she was overcome by a violent nausea, and, attending to her and soothing her, it was some time before we knew with whom we had to deal. Her first words reassured me.