If it were only this compulsion to touch wood I should not mind. But there are other tyrannies coincident which are more urgent and compelling. My whole mind--at times--seems taken up by the necessity for ritual actions. I have no time for quiet thought. Everything is broken in upon. There is the Sign of the Cross. I have linked even _that_ in the chain of my terrors. I touch wood and then I make this sign. I do it so often that I have invented all sorts of methods of doing it secretly in public, and quickly when I am alone. I do it in a sort of imaginary way. For instance, I bend my head and in so doing draw an imaginary line with my right eye upon the nearest wall, or upon the page of the book that I am reading. Then I move my head from side to side and make another fictitious line to complete the cross. A propos of making the sign, the imaginary lines nearly always go crooked in my brain. This especially so when I am doing it on a book. I follow two lines of type on both pages and use the seam of the binding between them to make the down strokes. But it hardly ever comes right the first time. I begin to notice people looking at me curiously as I try to get it right and my head moves about. If they only knew! Then another and more satisfactory way--for the imaginary method always makes my head ache for a second or two--I accomplish with the thumb of my right hand moving vertically down the first joint of the index finger, and then laterally. I can do this as often as I like and no one can possibly see me. I have a little copper Cross too, with "In hoc vinces" graved upon it. But I don't like using this much. It is too concrete. It reminds me of the use I am making of the symbol of salvation. "In hoc vinces"! Not I. There are times when I think that I am surely doomed. But I think that the worst of all the foul, senseless, and yet imperative petty lordships I endure, is the dominion of the two numbers. The Dominion of The Two Numbers!--capital letters shall indicate this! For some reason or other I have for years imagined mystical virtue in the number 7 and some maleficent influence in the number 13. These, of course, are old superstitions, but they, and all the others, ride me to a weariness of spirit which is near death. Although I got my first in "Lit. Hum." at Oxford, have read almost everything, and can certainly say that I am a man of wide culture and knowledge, Figures always gave me aversion and distaste. I got an open scholarship at my college and was as near as nothing ploughed in the almost formal preliminary exam of Responsions by Arithmetic. I can't add up my bank-book correctly even now, and I have no sense whatever of financial amounts and affairs. But I am a slave to the good but stern fairy 7 and the hell-hag 13.