stifiable. Angela was not suited to him.
Why could she not live away from him? Christian Science set aside
marriage entirely as a human illusion, conflicting with the
indestructible unity of the individual with God. Why shouldn't she let
him go?

He wrote poems to Suzanne, and read much poetry that he found in an old
trunkful of books in the house where he was living. He would read again
and again the sonnet beginning, "When in disgrace with fortune and men's
eyes"--that cry out of a darkness that seemed to be like his own. He
bought a book of verse by Yeats, and seemed to hear his own voice saying
of Suzanne,

"Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery ...

He was not quite as bad as he was when he had broken down eight years
before, but he was very bad. His mind was once more riveted upon the
uncertainty of life, its changes, its follies. He was studying those
things only which deal with the abstrusities of nature, and this began
to breed again a morbid fear of life itself. Myrtle was greatly
distressed about him. She worried lest he might lose his mind.

"Why don't you go to see a practitioner, Eugene?" she begged of him one
day. "You will get help--really you will. You think you won't, but you
will. There is something about them--I don't know what. They are
spiritually at rest. You will feel better. Do go."

"Oh, why do you bother me, Myrtle? Please don't. I don't want to go. I
think there is something in the idea metaphysically speaking, but why
should I go to a practitioner? God is as near me as He is anyone, if
there is a God."

Myrtle wrung her hands, and because she felt so badly more than anything
else, he finally decided to go. There might be something hypnotic or
physically contagious about these people--some old alchemy of the mortal
body, which could reach and soothe him. He believed in hypnotism,
hypnotic suggestion, etc. He finally called up one practitioner, an old
lady highly recommended by Myrtle and others, who lived farther south on
Broadway, somewhere in the neighborhood of Myrtle's home. Mrs. Althea
Johns was her name--a woman who had performed wonderful cures. Why
should he, Eugene Witla, he asked himself as he took up the receiver,
why should he, Eugene Witla, ex-managing publisher of the United
Magazines Corporation, ex-artist (in a way, he felt that he was no
longer an artist in the best sense) be going to a woman in Christian
Science to be healed of what? Gloom?