At last came an hour when I could bear my room no more. Every moment not engaged at the Laboratory I had passed there. Mrs. Mahon brought me food, and barred from me the world of newspapers and visitors and letters. I ate fruit and drank milk and gave up my tobacco. A gray cloth hung upon my book shelves, so that the deep associations of the titles should not distract me. At the Institute, I spoke to no one: I localized my work to its immediate details and stopped at that. The eyes of Doctor Stein, warm as soon as they beheld me, studied me first and then withdrew even from such delicate obtrusion. I was alone with my thoughts ... whatever they were: alone with myself, whoever that might be. At the end of fourteen days I faced the chaos of my mind. I had succeeded in pushing close my nerves to the home of my desire and they screamed with piercings. I had succeeded in breaking down the barriers between sense and impulse. The swarming congeries of will within me, no longer a mute coil, now in each thrust and writhe touched a quick nerve. This plethora of response that my nerves made to the world was an unwieldy burden. In a scatter of impulse and desire, my personality seemed on the verge of dissolution. Still most deeply imbedded in my swarming wills was the will to remain John Mark: and was the knowledge, born of the thwarting pause, that the invasion of my conscious senses into these arcana must cease, if I would not be fragmented and lost. I was exhausted. I knew that this loosing of the stuffs of my being was an advance: even if the secret lay still beyond. I had made penetrable an approach. Nor did I take too seriously the protest of my self, crying in its impenetralia against my mind’s invasion. After all, what prize could I put on merely continuing to be John Mark? I needed knowledge! And if knowledge meant the snuffing out of this ephemeral phase I named John Mark, so be it.