For instance, was it not likely that all self-destructive impulses were the result of witchcraft, more or less efficiently screened off by protective magic, or not screened off at all? Those universal impulses that were a direct contradiction to the laws of self-preservation and survival. Poe had fancifully referred them to an "Imp of the Perverse," and psychoanalysts had laboriously hypothesized a "death instinct" to account for them. How much simpler to attribute them to malign forces outside the individual, working by means as yet unanalyzed and therefore classified as supernatural. His experiences during the past days could be divided into two distinct categories. The first included those natural misfortunes and antagonisms from which Tansy's magic had screened him. The attack on his life by Theodore Jennings should probably be placed in this category. The chances were that Jennings was actually psychopathic. He would have made his murderous attack at an earlier date, had not Tansy's protective magic kept it from getting started. As soon as the screen was down, as soon as Norman burned the last hand, the idea had suddenly burgeoned in Jennings' mind like a hothouse flower. Jennings had himself admitted it! "I didn't realize until this minute--" Margaret van Nice's accusation, Thompson's sudden burst of interest in his extracurricular activities, and Sawtelle's chance discovery of the Cunningham thesis also probably belonged in the same category. In the second category--active and malign witchcraft. * * * * * "A penny for your thoughts," offered Tansy, looking over the rim of her glass. "I was thinking of the party last Christmas," he replied smoothly, "and of how Welby crawled around playing a St. Bernard, with the bearskin rug over his shoulders and the bottle of whiskey slung under his neck." He felt a childish pride in his cunning at having avoided being trapped into an admission. He simultaneously thought of Tansy as a genuine witch and as a potentially neurotic individual who had to be protected at all costs from dangerous suggestions. The liquor made his mind work by parts, and the parts had no check on each other. His consciousness began to black out for indeterminate intervals. Things began to happen by fits and starts. They were wailing "St. James' Infirmary." He was thinking: "Why shouldn't the women be the witches? They're the intuitionalists, the traditionalists, the irrationalists. And like Tansy, most of them are never quite sure whether or not their witchcraft really works." They had shoved back the carpet and were dancing to "Chloe." Sometime or other she had changed to her rose dressing gown. He was thinking: "In the second category, put the Estrey dragon. Animated by a human or nonhuman soul conjured into it by Mrs. Gunnison and controlled through photographs. Inhibited by the Protective Screen so long as the Protective Screen existed."