ar Greenhalge
mayor. Thousands who had failed to understand Hermann Krebs, but whom he
had nevertheless stirred and troubled, suddenly awoke to the fact that
he had had elements of greatness....

My feelings in those first days at Santa Barbara may be likened, indeed,
to those of a man who has passed through a terrible accident that has
deprived him of sight or hearing, and which he wishes to forget. What I
was most conscious of then was an aching sense of loss--an ache that
by degrees became a throbbing pain as life flowed back into me,
re-inflaming once more my being with protest and passion, arousing me to
revolt against the fate that had overtaken me. I even began at moments
to feel a fierce desire to go back and take up again the fight from
which I had been so strangely removed--removed by the agency of things
still obscure. I might get Nancy yet, beat down her resistance, overcome
her, if only I could be near her and see her. But even in the midst of
these surges of passion I was conscious of the birth of a new force I
did not understand, and which I resented, that had arisen to give battle
to my passions and desires. This struggle was not mentally reflected as
a debate between right and wrong, as to whether I should or should not
be justified in taking Nancy if I could get her: it seemed as though
some new and small yet dogged intruder had forced an entrance into me,
an insignificant pigmy who did not hesitate to bar the pathway of the
reviving giant of my desires. These contests sapped my strength. It
seemed as though in my isolation I loved Nancy, I missed her more than
ever, and the flavour she gave to life.

Then Hermann Krebs began to press himself on me. I use the word as
expressive of those early resentful feelings,--I rather pictured him
then as the personification of an hostile element in the universe that
had brought about my miseries and accomplished my downfall; I attributed
the disagreeable thwarting of my impulses to his agency; I did not wish
to think of him, for he stood somehow for a vague future I feared to
contemplate. Yet the illusion of his presence, once begun, continued to
grow upon me, and I find myself utterly unable to describe that struggle
in which he seemed to be fighting as against myself for my confidence;
that process whereby he gradually grew as real to me as though he still
lived--until I could almost hear his voice and see his smile. At moments
I resisted wildly, as though my s