Instead of sinking at once into that ten-fathom-deep slumber to which a flawless conscience and eighteen strenuous holes entitled him, he passed into that exasperating border state where detached and leering images come flocking into one’s head, endlessly and inanely telescoping one another, composing indefinable patterns, humiliating puerilities, a state where there is neither the controlled rationality of full consciousness nor the deliciously serio-comic pantomime of the land of dreams. “This region,” he decided, “is the nearest approach to an understanding of that buzzing, wavering kaleidoscope called lunacy, which the sane person ever reaches. The mind can neither control, nor quite lose control of, these regurgitations of the memory--for that is what they must be.” Yet some of these images did not seem to be derived from the well-stored bins of his remembered experience. For example, he never recalled having entered long rows of figures--wild, whirling figures in a heavy ruled ledger. And that girl’s face which kept getting between his eyes and the ruled lines. He did not remember having seen anyone like her before. And there she was, sitting near him in a little enclosed garden, and then back came those figures--into what a raving rigmarole was he plunged! He woke up fully and sharply for a moment, and then--his will surrendering--fell into a deep sleep. Gradually the competing images hardened, and as the confused turmoil of a swiftly rising sea settles into the orderly march of mighty combers, they took unto themselves a sequence. Rows of figures staring out from a book, and then someone standing beside him and beckoning him. And then that long room and a table at which two men were sitting with books and papers in front of them, who looked at him searchingly. It was coming! He sat down on a chair to which one of these men motioned him. Then the other one began pointing at more rows of figures on a paper on the table. It was all over! Then one of the men put down his pencil and looked at him, and that girl’s face, placid, smiling, gentle, rose and filled the room. A terrible sense of caged frustration seized him. He walked back to the door and through it, and found himself flinging clothes into a bag, and then he looked up, and there was that lovely childish face looking down so easily at him. A terrible sense of loss--and there he was walking warily and glancing back down a street beside the sea, and there he was on his hands and knees creeping across the floor of a moon-lit room. He reached the window, the moon was pacing rainbow clouds, but what was that--that shadow flung so silently and so still from the trees? He crawled back to the bed, and his head was in his hands, and they seemed to press and force out that girl’s face, radiating love and trust. He staggered up, and a moment later he felt life choking and twisting from him.