"--a means. A useful insight." I felt a bead of sweat roll from my armpit down my corrugated ribs. "The basic assumption is mistaken, though. It omits instinct. No cortical rearrangement will accomplish much, even with semantics, until it admits instinct--" "I always wondered whether you understood the subject. Guess you do. But I still don't see Jung's slant." How cleverly the thumb and finger de-wing the caught fly! And how the fly beats its legs in satisfactory protest! If I had injured his composure in some book or other, some essay, he would avenge it now. I stared at the flaring spectacles of this penny-ante sadist and swore to myself that he could sweat me--and all his full waiting room--till Gabriel put his brass horn to his lips before I'd twitch my foot. And in this outlandish, familiar crisis of our everyday relations, I brought forth with the energies of wrath another formulation. I blew smoke at the fat little hamster. "You can put it this way. Jung sees the source of the superego as unconscious, too--just as Freud sees the id. To Jung--both are continuums of instinct. That's all. Any culture--even the culture of you physical scientists, which is mostly yet to come--rises from instinct, not from the frontal lobes. If you think of superego as subconscious in source and merely the opposite of id, you can understand Toynbee--and Toynbee's error about a churchly salvation for this day and age. You might actually understand Jesus--and what Christianity was intended to be to people. You can understand a great deal that even most psychologists don't know about." "Interesting," he said, and he gave up. There were papers on his desk. "Like to mull it over with you someday." He discarded two or three sheets. "I've got a report on you here somewhere." He found it, finally. "Negative." He glanced at me and chuckled. "Cobb, my associate, was fooled. Told me he was all but sure of carcinoma. The thing--" he read to himself--"is a rather rare lymphatic growth. But two or three mild doses of X-ray will obliterate it. You'll never be able to see the site. Cobb will give you the first treatment straight off. Only take a few minutes. Just hold your mouth open--and shed your troubles." He chuckled again. "Mighty glad to meet you, Wylie. Maybe, someday, you'd come up to Westchester and talk to a little group I'm a member of--" I said I would, breaking my rule. And that was that. It happens to millions. The frightful diagnosis, the aching interlude, the laboratory check, reprieve. Till next time. It is one of the you-knows. Half an hour later I went down to the level of the street. The lobby of this particular medical building was a poorly lighted, sparsely furnished marble sepulcher and along it lay a track of corrugated rubber matting upon which were the coming and going footprints of us all. I sat on a stone bench. Weakness was for a while my only sensation. My thoughts ran feebly. They had given it back to me.