I have been reading too much in this tattered old note-book of O'Meara's. It is my constant companion these widowed days, and the mystic vapour that exhales from his thought has gone to my head like opium. I must get rid of the obsession by publishing the book as a psychological document or by destroying it once for all. With its quotations and original reflections it alternates from page to page between the sullen despair of a man who has hoped too often in vain and a rare form of inverted exaltation. As with me, it was apparently his custom, when the loneliness of fate oppressed him, to go out and wander up and down Broadway, seeking the regions by night or day where the people thronged most busily and steeping his fancy in the turmoil of its illusion. I can see his ill-clad figure with bowed head moving slowly amid the jostling multitude, and I smile to think how surprised the brave folk would be, who passed him as he shuffled along and who no doubt drew their skirts away lest they should be polluted by rubbing against him, if they could hear some of the meditations in his book and learn the pride of this despised tramp. Many times he repeats the proverb: _Rem carendo non fruendo cognoscimus_--By losing not by enjoying the world we make it ours. Out of the utter ruin and abandonment of his life he seems to have won for himself a spiritual possession akin to that of the saints, only inverted as it were. The impersonal detachment they gained by rising above human affairs, he found by sinking below them. He looked upon the world as one absolutely set apart from it, and through that isolation attained a strange insight into its significance, and even a kind of intoxicating joy. On me in my state of bewildered loneliness his mood exerts an alarming fascination. It is dangerous to surrender one's self too submissively to this perception of universal illusion unless a strong will is present or some master passion as a guide; for without these the brain is dizzied, and barely does a man escape the temptation to throw away all effort and sink gradually into the stupor of indifference or something worse. I have felt the madness creep upon me too often of late and I am afraid. Ah, Jessica, in withdrawing the hope of your blessing from me you know not into what perils of blank indifference you have cast my soul. Shall I drift away into the hideous nightmare that pursued O'Meara? I will seal up his book, and make strong my determination to work and in work achieve my own destiny. LIII PHILIP TO JACK It seems very lonesome in the big city without you, little Jack, and often I wish that some of this pile of books around me were carried away and you were brought back to me in their place. But it is better for you where you are.