Dudley gave up the attempt to take Laurence into his life. Dudley had insisted on seeing the Farleys several times, but the result of these meetings was always disappointing. What he considered their small hard pride erected about them a wall of impenetrable reserves. He pitied them in their conventionality. They regard me, he thought, as a wrecker of homes, and the fact that I have been Julia's lover prevents them from recognizing me in any other guise. He felt that he was learning a lesson. He must avoid destructive intimacies. If he gave, even to small souls, he had to give everything. In order to save himself for his art he must learn to refuse. He was in terror of love, in terror of his own necessities, and afraid of meeting acquaintances who, with the brutality of casual minds, could shake his confidence in himself by uncomprehending statements regarding his work. He grew morbid, shut himself up in his studio, and refused to admit any validity in the art of painters of his own generation. He persuaded himself that he was the successor of El Greco and that since El Greco no painter had done anything which could be considered of significance to the human race. He would not even admit that Cézanne (whom he had formerly admired) was a man of the first order. He was a painter, to be sure, but Dudley could ally himself only with those whose gifts were prophetic. His imaginings about himself assumed such grandiose proportions that he scarcely dared to believe in them. To avoid any responsibility for his conception of himself he was persuaded that there was a taint of madness in him. Rather than awaken from a dream and find everything a delusion, he would take his own life. He lay all day in his room and kept the blinds drawn, and was tortured with pessimistic thoughts, until, by the very blankness of his misery, he was able to overcome the critical conclusions of his intelligence. He did not eat enough and his health began to suffer. His absorption in death drew him to concrete visions of what would follow his suicide. He was unable to close his eyes without confronting the vision of his own putrid disintegrating flesh. In his body he found infinite pathos. As much as he wanted to escape his physical self, it was sickening to think of leaving it to the indignities of burial at the hands of its enemies. The idea of suicide, haunting him persistently, aroused a resistant spirit in him. He exaggerated the envies of his contemporaries. He fancied that they feared him far more than they actually did and were longing for his annihilation. He decided that something occult which originated outside him was impelling him toward self-destruction. In refusing to kill himself he was combating evil suggestions rather than succumbing to his own repugnance to suffering and ugliness.