I am John Mark, M.D. I title myself so, even in my dreams: for it is a new title and for long it was dream. I worked hard for it. I do not want you to think that I am dull, so that the winning of that not rare degree was difficult. No: I am above the average in intelligence--but in ambition also. Even as a student I did not aim at becoming a mere doctor. John Mark, M.D., was to have a higher connotation. It was to stand not for the usual empiric healer: but for the leader, for the creator. I am on the way. I am twenty-eight, and a citizen of New York, where I was born and where my mother was born: my father is of an old family from Vermont. For three years upon a small income inherited from my mother’s father, I studied in Vienna, in Zurich, in Paris, in Saint Petersburg. What there was of theory to learn in my especial field I learned with ease and no great exhilaration. (It was little, after all.) What inspired and nurtured me was the personal contact of half a dozen men, masters whom I had read and reverenced for years from a humble distance. They received me: they showed interest in my work. They came to look upon me, subtly I felt this, as a potential equal. And I, harvesting the ripe treasure of their science, grew to recognize that their superiority was not one of stuff or spirit, but of years and labor. I found that my own impulse was very close to theirs: my power to abstract phenomenal data equally intense: my capacity to associate my findings, to link them up and to transcend them in intuitional concepts possibly as great. I was no epigone to these masters. They learned that they could speak with me in that shorthand of intimate understanding which is the one articulate language. I was one of them: part of their fuller to-morrow! I came back to my city, glowing. And almost at once I attained the post I needed at the Institute. The Laboratory was mine: I stood at a delicious dawn of intellectual action: I tasted the ecstasy of the hour in which my will and the world’s will, my means and the world’s tools seemed one. My salary scarce paid the rent of a snug two-room flat. But my little income met the rest of my needs. I asked nothing of my father who was rich, and he asked nothing of me. Books were my one extravagance--Gothic tomes and palimpsests where mediæval mystics had imposed their swelling dreams upon the flat clarities of Rome. I knew myself for a sociable and a sensual man. But my work, like an expanding empire, had gradually absorbed the time and energy whereby youth spreads itself. The companionship of a few men, students like myself or masters as I meant to be a master, gave me a deeper satisfaction than the common social fare. And although my desire for woman was great, it was painfully involved with my intelligence and with the difficult measure of my nerves. I was less drawn by the sweet flesh than repelled by the dullness and unchastity of women.