unded to find his beloved wife performing upon the stage of a
cheap, dirty place. An excerpt from his description of this eventful
voyage is as follows: "We passed Las Palmas, Asuncion, and St. Helena.
Christmas and New Year's were celebrated on board the ship, but I did
not care much for it. I was too much in distress. Would I find her
there? Would I reach her in time? How would I find her? Would she be
alive? My excitable fantasy awakened in me the most terrible suspicions.
I suffered dreadfully, and it seemed to me we would never arrive. But we
did at last, and some time in the beginning of January, 1906, I landed
in Cape Town." This is how he discovered her: "I knew I was going to see
something terrible, but I remained there--I had to. There were the rope
dancers, the clowns, and the music, but I had no interest in them. I was
waiting for L., my wife, and she came. On a small, mean stage L., my
beloved wife, appeared with painted cheeks and shining eyes, dressed up
in tights. She was dancing a mean dance and singing an obscene song
before an audience consisting mostly of drunken sailors. So I found my
wife L. and the music played. It was surely wonderful that I could
control myself at such a moment. At once it seemed to me that I had no
reason to be astonished. I was quiet and decided and waited until the
show was over, and after the show I went behind the stage, and when my
wife came out, laughing and happy, with a couple of other girls, I
stepped near her and said simply 'L.' She gazed at me and fainted." Thus
he finishes another tableau in his adventurous career. Several other
similarly dramatic adventures follow in his history, the last of which
landed him, wholly unjustifiably, in prison for ten years. When asked
why all his love adventures ended so disastrously, he replied: "Doctor,
all my life I have been suffering from a 'superaltruistic monomania to
help girls in distress,' and that is how I'm repaid."

Any discussion on "freedom of will" and responsibility in connection
with an individual of this type is, of course, quite futile and really
of no practical importance. This man ought to be permanently isolated
from the community, but not because he happens to have violated a given
statute, but because his grave mental defect--in all probability an
incurable defect--tends to express itself in criminal traits.

Back of this fantastic lying we see again that instinctive craving for
compensation by means of a re