I had definite reasons for asking myself many of the questions that came to me as I lay in my bed at night. I had already published several stories and, for some reason I had not clearly understood, many people in reading my stories had been made angry by them. Many abusive letters had been written me. I had been called a pervert, a thoroughly nasty man. Was I that? I thought if I was I had better find out. My own hands looked all right to me as I lay on my bed looking at them in the moonlight. Were they unclean hands? There had been a few times, for brief periods only, when they had seemed to me to serve my purpose. I had felt something deeply, been quite impersonally absorbed in something in the life about me and my hands had of a sudden come to life. They had arranged words on paper I thought very skillfully. How clean I had felt during just those moments! It was the feeling I had always been seeking. At last, in a crippled way to be sure but after a fashion, my whole being had become a quite impersonal thing, expressing itself on paper through written words. The life about me seemed to have become my life. I sang as I worked, as in my boyhood I had often seen old craftsmen sing and as I had never heard men sing in the factories. And for what I had written at such times I had been called unclean by men and women who had never known me, could have had no personal reasons for thinking me unclean. Was I unclean? Were the hands that, for such brief periods of my life, had really served me, had they been unclean at such moments of service? Other thoughts came. Even my friend Paul Rosenfeld had called me “the Phallic Chekhov.” Had I a sex obsession? Was I a goner? Another American, Mr. Henry Adams, had evidently been as puzzled as I was at that moment although I am sure he would never have been so undignified as to have written, as I am doing here, of himself as lying on a bed in a New York rooming house and putting his own hands up into the moonlight to stare at them. However he had been equally puzzled. “Singularly enough,” he had said in his book, “The Education of Henry Adams,” “singularly enough, not one of Adams’ many schools of education has ever drawn his attention to the opening lines of Lucretius, though they were perhaps the finest in all Latin literature, where the poet invoked Venus exactly as Dante invoked the Virgin:” ‘Quae, quoniam rerum naturam Sola gubernas.’ “The Venus of Epicurean philosophy survived in the Virgin of the Schools.” ‘Donna, sei tanto grande, e tanta vali, Che qual vuol grazia, e a te non ricorre, Sua Disianza vuol volar senz’ ali.’