I fed my esthetic feelings at the art gallery, library, and theatre. I attended several performances at the Fine Arts Theatre of the Irish Players, and enjoyed their simple, honest humor. By Friday it began to peter out. Depression, unaccountable as usual, began to come over me. I shook it off, but it could not be gainsaid, and on Saturday night, January 25th, I attended a performance of Strindberg’s “Creditors” and “The Stronger” at the Chicago Little Theatre, with ill-suppressed feelings of impending disaster, which, however, I realized, as of old, were temporary and unfounded, perhaps, but nevertheless enough to give me hours of hell, hell, hell. The circumstance agreed with my mood, and in a way awakened my ambition to have my own work performed and read, but the realization after of the work, utter lack of appreciation of such work of genius by the general English and American reading public, and moreover, the ever present dislike and fear of going back to office work and working on from year to year to no purpose, until insanity or death ended it all,--brought on all past forebodings, and I went down to the closed district, found a woman, more, two, and disgusted myself with life to the limit; went home and cursed, raved, and what not, until exhaustion brought on fitful, wild slumber, and I awoke with a headache, weak, repentant, defiant, and I know not what. I might right here give the immediate supplementary cause of my suicide decision, over and above those enumerated. As long as I was at work I still had hope. In Havana I was weaker, felt more poisoned physically and mentally than before or since, but the thought of artistic success sustained me. I looked forward to dropping the intolerable burden on finishing my work there, and going ahead and becoming a writer. This kept me on through it all, when I worked on sheer nerve and every day was an agony. In ---- I still cherished the delusion--I was a genius, a superman, and would show them all. When I settled down in ---- and bought a typewriter I started typewriting my shorthand notes, put down in Havana, describing my moods, passions and various mental conditions, having in mind writing a book, “The Youth Who Was Prematurely Tired” .... mental struggles and states. On getting down to it, however, the thought that if I was to do anything it must be done while the money I had saved by scrimping, scraping, sacrificing social life, amusement, almost everything,--lasted, which would not be any too long, and then, the old agony of uncongenial hellish work,--this thought took away everything. The bottom fell out, and from that time on, last September and October, I have steadily lost all confidence and hope in myself, and my grip on life. The thought of going back to work .... the mental state of which it had been the product, haunted me unceasingly.