Are you sane or are you insane? Why this whirlpool of thoughts within your brain, a whirlpool of thoughts that, as you now stand hesitant, seem to be sucking you down and down into a bottomless pit? BOOK ONE MANY MARRIAGES I There was a man named Webster lived in a town of twenty-five thousand people in the state of Wisconsin. He had a wife named Mary and a daughter named Jane and he was himself a fairly prosperous manufacturer of washing machines. When the thing happened of which I am about to write he was thirty-seven or eight years old and his one child, the daughter, was seventeen. Of the details of his life up to the time a certain revolution happened within him it will be unnecessary to speak. He was however a rather quiet man inclined to have dreams which he tried to crush out of himself in order that he function as a washing machine manufacturer; and no doubt, at odd moments, when he was on a train going some place or perhaps on Sunday afternoons in the summer when he went alone to the deserted office of the factory and sat for several hours looking out through a window and along a railroad track, he gave way to dreams. However for many years he went quietly along his way doing his work like any other small manufacturer. Now and then he had a prosperous year when money seemed plentiful and then he had bad years when the local banks threatened to close him up, but as a manufacturer he did manage to survive. And so there was this Webster, drawing near to his fortieth year, and his daughter had just graduated from the town high school. It was early fall and he seemed to be going along and living his life about as usual and then this thing happened to him. Down within his body something began to affect him like an illness. It is a little hard to describe the feeling he had. It was as though something were being born. Had he been a woman he might have suspected he had suddenly become pregnant. There he sat in his office at work or walked about in the streets of his town and he had the most amazing feeling of not being himself, but something new and quite strange. Sometimes the feeling of not being himself became so strong in him that he stopped suddenly in the streets and stood looking and listening. He was, let us say, standing before a small store on a side street. Beyond there was a vacant lot in which a tree grew and under the tree stood an old work horse.