These are the wilderness-wrestlings of the great-souled--the Gethsemanes. Out of the dream, would appear the actual spectacle of the City--human beings preying one upon the other, the wolf still frothing in man's breast--and then would crush down upon her with shattering pain the realization of her own hopeless ineffectuality. To a mind thus stricken and desolated often, premonitions of madness come at last--madness, the black brother of genius. There is safety alone in a body strong and undefiled to receive again the expanded spirit. From how many a lustrous youth--tarrying too long by the fetid margins of sense--has the glory winged away, never to return to a creature fallen into hairy despoliation. * * * * * Paula had returned from down-town about noon. Reifferscheid, who had a weakness for Herman Melville, and annually endeavored to spur the American people into a more adequate appreciation of the old sea-lion, had ordered her to rest her eyes for a few days in _Moby Dick_. With the fat, old fine-print novel under her arm, Paula let herself into her own apartment and instantly encountered the occultist's power. She sank to the floor and covered her face in the pillows of the couch. In the past twenty-four hours she had come to believe that the enemy had been put away forever, yet here in her own room she was stricken, and so swiftly.... Though she did not realize it at once, many of the thoughts which gradually surged into her mind were not her own. She came to see Bellingham as other women saw him--as a great and wise doctor. Her own conception battled against this, but vainly, vaguely. It was as if he held the balance of power in her consciousness. Without attempting to link them together, the processes of her mind quickly will be set into words. Her first thought, before the tightening of Bellingham's control in her brain, was to rush into his presence and fiercely arraign him for the treachery he had committed. After blaming Madame Nestor and deforming her own faculties to clear him from evil, the devilishness of the present visitation overwhelmed. And how infinitely more black and formidable now was his magic--after the utterances in the Park! This was her last real stand.... A cry of hopelessness escaped her lips, for the numbness was already about her eyes, and creeping back like a pestilence along the open highways of her mind. "Come to me. The way is open. I am alone. I am near.... Come to me, Paula Linster, of plentiful treasures.... Do you not see the open way--how near I am? Oh, come--now--come to me now!"