Could I have been mentally, morally, even physically, well when I had this dream? Childish and foolish, perhaps, it had at the time an intensity the effect of which lingered on long after I had awakened. There is something disquieting in the thought that so slender a veil should separate the world of order and sanity from a world of disorder and delirium such as my eyes were opened to then. Yet that other world is always there, waiting, and the veil may be torn at any moment, letting tongues of the dreadful, flaming light shoot through. The Christ of my dream was not a blasphemous creation of my own mind, but a sort of distorted memory of one or two pictures in a book about Byzantine wall-paintings I had looked at years before. The main fact, however, psychologically, is, I suppose, the fact that I kept a journal at all. Probably what was at the bottom of it was an idea of confession which now haunted me. It came to me in several relations. I thought of Owen, thought it was my duty to tell him everything about myself, and that in this way we might make our friendship perfect. At other times I feared that instead of doing this it might do just the opposite. I was not sure, either, what my motive really was――whether it really proceeded from a sense of duty, or only from a desire of personal relief. It was strange that while in many respects I continued to have an exaggerated opinion of myself, I should yet have been so frequently visited just now by hours of despondency, when I imagined my life as already irretrievably doomed to failure. I did not look upon myself as an ordinary person, or the crisis through which I was passing as an ordinary crisis. I began to ponder over the meaning of sin and damnation, and I figured this latter quality as a condition of mind which attracts evil, and from which no evil can be hidden. When I was with Owen my troubles grew fainter, and even disappeared. Mentally, morally, he had upon me much the same effect as, physically, a draught of fresh air would have had, after long confinement in a stifling atmosphere. I admired him; I envied him his freedom from all that made my own life just now so difficult. I discussed the question of free will with him, but I no more believed in it than did my Arabian Nights heroes. I was as closely imprisoned in my own physical temperament as a rat in a trap. And if I were to die? For the first time it dawned upon me that one might pass into a spiritual world as dark and dreadful as any I had ever seen in a dream. With this appalling thought it occurred to me that a priest might be the best person to confess to, and I began to consider to whom I could go. CHAPTER XXXIV