ain for itself. I walk cautiously. Yet I am lost.

"To think has become like adding a continually increasing column of
figures. I sit and add. The figures will add up into a finite sum and
this sum will be the understanding of myself. I apply myself carefully
to each figure and say, 'two and three are five. Five and seven are
twelve.' But as I reach what seems an end I find more figures waiting
me.

"I can no longer add up the fragments or interpret them. I must be
content now to sit and wait until this part of me--my relation to
myself--splinters into fragments and I become a dice box shaking with
mysterious and invisible combinations.

"It is the phantom Rita that is threatening to drive me into darkness.
Since I murdered her in the street, the hallucination has become
overwhelming. It is with me almost continually. When I open my eyes from
sleep I find it waiting at my bed. The hallucination leaves me when I am
outside, although at times a trace of it returns and I seem more to feel
its presence within me than behold it with my senses.

"Yes, I am clinging desperately to these moments of objectivity which
enable me to write. But even they threaten to betray me. For as I write
doubts dance like macabre figures among my words. The very sentences
seem to stretch themselves into ridiculous postures. And I must almost
close my eyes and stumble blindly through a storm of denouements.

"I desired to create for myself a world within which I might love and
hate--to be a God lost within his dream. Madness was necessary, so I
embraced it. But my dream becomes the product of a Frankenstein.
She--the hallucination--is more real to my senses than am I. And I can
no longer control her. My senses are unfaithful to me. They philander
clownishly with this mirage of my thought. Then what is there left? I.
This grim figure stumbling with his head down through a storm of
denouements. I persist--an unwelcome visitor, a bargain-hunting tourist
in Bedlam. I remain.

"But it is a boast that laughs back at me. For I will soon be a little
plaything of my phantom. Last night I walked until I thought I had rid
myself. Her eyes alone lingered. Her hands moved like slow dancers. But
I walked and said to myself, 'I am tired of nonsense. I am tired of this
monotonous hallucination. At least let me be unfaithful to my dream
since I am the God who created it.'

"I walked to the street where a month ago she had followed me under the
arc lamp. I