The tremendous discovery in this interval was that the open boat events which had proved so salutary and constructive in his own case, did not appear to have a comparable effect upon others when he related them. He began to believe that he had not authority, and that he must somehow try to gain authority by making good with men. He had his story to tell. He had seen the spirit and the flesh--beast and saint--watched them die. All life and hope and meaning were caught and held, as he saw it, between the manner of the deaths of two men. This experience had changed him--if not for the better--then he was insane. It was hard for him to grasp, that the thing which had changed him could not change others--even Bessie. Yet those who listened, except Davy and his mother, appeared to think that he was making much of an adventure for personal reasons. He tried to write his story, but felt the bones of his skull as never before. He began, “I am a simple man,” but deep guile might be construed to that.... “I want nothing,” he wrote, “but to make you see the half that I saw in the open boat,” and he heard the world replying in his consciousness, “The open boat is on this man Bellair’s nerves. It’s his mania. The sun or the thirst _did_ touch him a bit.”... He became afraid to talk much even with Bessie, and New York boomed by, leaving him out--out.... He tried to lift the signs of misery on the way to the home of Davy’s mother, and in the surrounding halls, but the extent and terror of it dismayed him; and remarkably enough, always this same answer came: that he must get himself and the South Sea business in hand before a true beginning could be made here.... It wasn’t on Seventh avenue that he found a cigar store to suit his purpose in this interval, but the promise was certainly as good as the old one. He put the New Zealand young man in charge, on a basis designed to challenge any one’s quality; and having done this in a businesslike fashion, Bellair made haste to escape. The sense was cool and abiding in his mind that in this case, as in Lot & Company’s, the circle was complete. Still he retained the suspicion that the young man did not believe him sane. He followed the singer when she permitted, to dressmakers, rehearsals, quartette performances and meals; found other men following singers similarly, in all their byways of routine; he disliked them, disliked himself.