on of the race, the passion for release from mortal
existence, the passion for death. At that moment he felt, and
probably felt truly, that had he been in dire peril, he would not
have lifted a finger in self-preservation. He turned his eyes inward
upon himself with greed for his own life, for his own blood, and back
of that was the ravening thirst for release from the world and the
flesh and the miseries which appertained to them, as one suffocating
might thirst for air. He realized suddenly himself, stifling and
agonizing, behind a window which he had no need to wait for an
overruling Providence to open, which was not too heavy for his own
mortal strength, which he could open himself. He realized that
whatever lay outside _was_ outside; it was air outside this air,
misery outside this particular phase which was driving him mad. His
imagination dwelling upon the different means of suicide, now became
judicial. He thought seriously upon the drawbacks to one, the
advantages of another. Then since the man was essentially unselfish
and fond of his own flesh and blood, he began to reflect upon the
horror of a confessed suicide to them. He began to study the
feasibility of a suicide forever undiscovered. He began to plan how
the thing might distress his family as little as possible. His cigar
went out as he sat and studied. The furnace fire was low and the room
grew cold. He never noticed it. He studied and studied the best means
of suicide, the best means of concealing it, and all the time the
greed for it was increasing until his veins seemed to run with a
liquid fire of monstrous passion, the passion of a mortal man for his
own immolation upon fate, and all the time that sense of intolerable
suffocation by existence itself, by the air of the world, increased.

He had now arrived at a state of mind where every new phase was
produced by suggestion. He was, in a sense, hypnotized. Everything
served to swing him this way or that, up or down. The sight of a
little perfume-bottle on the table, a dainty glass thing traced over
with silver, set him thinking eagerly of another little bottle, of
glass with a silver stopper, his wife's vinaigrette which she was
fond of using when her head ached. From that, the contemplation of
inhaling aromatic salts, he went naturally enough to the inhaling of
more potent things which assuage pain, and could assuage, if taken in
sufficient quantities, the pain of life itself. He remembered the
exa