The good discharge was sufficient to get me a berth on a ship sailing for San Francisco. Once at sea again I was all right except in my mind. That had been all twisted and distorted by the punishment inflicted upon me by Captain Hawkins. I couldn’t get over the disgrace of it; which was deserved, of course, though I didn’t think so. I kept thinking of myself as a man who had been shamed beyond all deserving. I was convinced that I had merely been too rashly assuming, and that if I had gone about it differently or had taken more time, had not acted so impulsively----All this was self-deception, of course, and it degraded Keturah Hawkins, in my thoughts, at least. Perhaps I thought that if I could not lift myself up to her I could pull her down to my level. What I didn’t see was that a good woman--or a good man either, likely--cannot be lowered by whatever baseness any one may choose to think or say. The only person that is lowered is the thinker or the sayer. You’ll find this and a whole lot more coiled away in that poem of Emerson’s about Brahma: “I am the thinker and the thought,” or something like that, it runs. I don’t know whether a man makes the thought that passes through his mind, but I do know that the thought makes the man. At least, it made me. I was still Jacob King, but I wasn’t the same Jacob King. Something in me had been poisoned. The slow poisoning of----? The swiftest poison is not the most sure. I was very bad, I mean mentally, when I got to San Francisco, and the life I led there did not mend me. Gradually as I kept seeing the image of Keturah Hawkins in all states of sleep and waking, at all hours and under the influence of all sorts of drugs and in the midst of all kinds of surroundings the image itself faded; or changed and coarsened. I did not notice that the dazzling blue, as of sunshine trying vainly to shaft through unfathomable depths, had disappeared from her eyes, but soon I could no longer see those heavy cables of dark red hair, made up of so many twisted strands, nor the wonderful milky whiteness of the skin. The features became indistinct, and soon I saw clearly nothing but the magnificent jewels she had worn--the ropes of pearls that took lustre from her skin; the emeralds that shone in green drops in the rich, dark, smouldering red of her hair; the sapphires that seemed to condense and make permanent the more brilliant blue of her eyes. About these gems that she had worn there was the glitter, the undying glitter of hard stones. All that was lovely, all that was spiritual, all that was human in the vision of her perished; and still the splendour of those jewels remained. I used to see her as an imperceptible outline--no face, no rounded arm, no wealth of hair, just an imagined outline with here and there certain gorgeous jewels in an ornamental and decorative arrangement--fastened on the air.