man--but we'll have to rise to it for Susan's sake; see this thing
through together. I feel utterly imbecile and helpless alone."

Half an hour later I had ended my monologue, and we both sat silent,
staring at the dulled embers on the hearth....

At length Phil drew in a slow, involuntary breath.

"Hunt," he said, "it's a humiliating thing for a professional
philosopher to admit, but I simply can't trust myself to advise you. I
don't know what you ought to do; I don't know what Susan ought to do; or
what I should do. I don't even know what your wife should do; though I
feel fairly certain that whatever it is, she will try something else.
Frankly, I'm too much a part of it all, too heartsick, for honest
thought."

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