with his head full of the contrast between this visit and my former
attitude. Could it be that it was only the night before I had made a
speech against him and his associates? It is interesting that my mind
rejected all sense of anomaly and inconsistency. Krebs possessed me; I
must have been in reality extremely agitated, but this sense of being
possessed seemed a quiet one. An amazing thing had happened--and yet I
was not amazed. The Krebs I had seen was the man I had known for many
years, the man I had ridiculed, despised and oppressed, but it seemed to
me then that he had been my friend and intimate all my life: more than
that, I had an odd feeling he had always been a part of me, and that now
had begun to take place a merging of personality. Nor could I feel that
he was a dying man. He would live on....

I could not as yet sort and appraise, reduce to order the possessions he
had wished to turn over to me.

It was noon, and people were walking past me in the watery, diluted
sunlight, men in black coats and top hats and women in bizarre,
complicated costumes bright with colour. I had reached the more
respectable portion of the city, where the churches were emptying. These
very people, whom not long ago I would have acknowledged as my own kind,
now seemed mildly animated automatons, wax figures. The day was like
hundreds of Sundays I had known, the city familiar, yet passing strange.
I walked like a ghost through it....

XXVI.

Accompanied by young Dr. Strafford, I went to California. My physical
illness had been brief. Dr. Brooke had taken matters in his own hands
and ordered an absolute rest, after dwelling at some length on the
vicious pace set by modern business and the lack of consideration and
knowledge shown by men of affairs for their bodies. There was a limit
to the wrack and strain which the human organism could stand. He must
of course have suspected the presence of disturbing and disintegrating
factors, but he confined himself to telling me that only an exceptional
constitution had saved me from a serious illness; he must in a way have
comprehended why I did not wish to go abroad, and have my family join me
on the Riviera, as Tom Peters proposed. California had been my choice,
and Dr. Brooke recommended the climate of Santa Barbara.

High up on the Montecito hills I found a villa beside the gateway of one
of the deep canons that furrow the mountain side, and day after day
I lay in a chair on th