“You sit there,” he cried, “a bit of ice yourself. I feel no warmth from you; I am not a human being to you, but just another case. Everywhere I look for Christ and find a Devil. But you scientists will never save the world without love--yea, and hate, too. Fire cleanses and resurrects, but the ice freezes and slays. You would embalm me too in your waste places; and there is no healing in it. Feel this asylum--chilly and cold and full of living death--and the blasted crowd waiting for a great lover to cast out their demons. He is late in coming; He is late in coming.” The something that was strange in his voice, his manner and in his words troubled me deeply. “You are quite right,” I said simply. “Forgive me for my attitude.” He looked at me attentively and spoke more softly. “There is some hope for you, then,” he murmured. “Look,” and he reached and brought a sheet of drawing paper from the little table beside him. He had drawn a picture in crayon, and done it very well. There was a powerful man, with arms crossed on his chest, standing like a Napoleon on an ice-sheathed rock, and out of the sky a lightning in the form of a great serpent had leaped down and was about to fasten his fangs into the man’s eyes. “Wonderful!” I cried. “And it means?” “You tell me what it means,” he commanded. It flashed intuitively across my mind that it meant: “He who sees too much must be struck blind.” I told him and he was highly pleased: he regarded me affectionately. “This is the first human contact I have had in a long time,” he said. “Except, of course, some of the lunatics....” “But how,” I asked, “can a man see too much, and why is such a man like Napoleon?” “Ah,” he said, “when Christ was shown the kingdoms of the world from a high mountain, he chose then between Cæsar and the Galilean. Seeing, man--to see, to know--knowledge, they say, is power.... But when one is blind then one sees truly ... sees inwardly. ‘They have eyes, but they see not’....” I felt his meaning, though, to use the word in his sense, I did not see it. “And what is the serpent?” I asked. “The gods.” “Then you believe in the gods?” “I have always believed in them,” he said in his strange voice again, “but I laughed at them. The great Dr. Farraday laughed at the gods. Believed? Of course. The fool says in his heart, There is no God. And the intellectual says in his heart, There are gods, and I laugh at them.” We sat in silence, smoking, and now and then I felt him trying to pierce me with a look. At last he said: “You are troubled, my friend.” “Yes, I am troubled,” I admitted. “We are all troubled in these days.”