He smiled drearily and added, as if at random: "'Physician, heal thyself.' What an abysmal joke! How the fiends of hell must treasure it. They have only one better--'Man is a reasonable being!'" He rose, or rather he seemed to be propelled from his chair. "Hunt! Would you really like to know what all my days and nights of intense study have come to? The kind of man you've turned to for strength? My life has come to just this: I love her, and she doesn't love me! "Oh!" he cried--"Go home. For God's sake, go home! I'm ashamed...." So I departed, like Omar, through the same door wherein I went; but not before I had grasped--as it seemed to me for the first time--Phil's hand. VIII There are some verses in Susan's notebook of this period, themselves undated, and never subsequently published, which--from their position on the page--must have been written about this time and may have been during the course of the momentous evening on which I met Jimmy Kane at Phil Farmer's rooms. I give them now, not as a favorable specimen of her work, since she thought best to exclude them from her first volume, but because they throw some light at least on the complicated and rather obscure state of mind that was then hers. They have no title, and need none. If you should feel they need interpretation--"_guarda e passa_"! They are not for you. _Though she rose from the sea There were stains upon her whiteness; All earth's waters had not sleeked her clean. For no tides gave her birth, Nor the salt, glimmering middle depths; But slime spawned her, the couch of life, The sunless ooze, The green bed of Poseidon, Where with sordid Chaos he mingles obscurely. Her flanks were of veined marble; There were stains upon her._ _But she who passes, lonely, Through waste places, Through bog and forest; Who follows boar and stag Unwearied; Who sleeps, fearless, among the hills; Though she track the wilds, Though she breast the crags, Choosing no path-- Her kirtle tears not, Her ankles gleam, Her sandals are silver._ IX It was midnight when I reached my own door that night, but I was in no mood for lying in bed stark awake in the spiritual isolation of darkness. I went straight to my study, meaning to make up a fire and then hypnotize myself into some form of lethargy by letting my eyes follow the printed lines of a book. If reading in any other sense than physical habit proved beyond me, at least the narcotic monotony of habit might serve.