all control.
Liberty is my fetish. And now I had offered a sacrifice to a prisoning
unselfishness, to a false god that binds and gags its devotees. I was
angry, and I violently resumed my former course. But now I began to be
ceaselessly companioned by uneasiness, by a furtive cowardice that was
desolating. I felt that I was watched, and by some one who suffered when
I sinned, who shrank and shuddered when I followed where my desires led.

"It was the monk.

"Soon I gave to him a most definite personality. I endowed him with a
mind and with moods. I imagined not only a heart for him, but a voice,
deep with a certain ecclesiastical beauty, austere, with a note more apt
for denunciation than for praise. His face was my own face, but with an
expression not mine, elevated, almost fanatical, yet nobly beautiful;
praying eyes--and mine were only observant; praying lips--and mine were
but sensitively sensual. And he was haggard with abstinence, while
I--was I not often haggard with indulgence? Yes, his face was mine, and
not mine. It seemed the face of a great saint who might have been a
great sinner. Bernard, that is the most attractive face in all the
world. Accustoming myself thus to a thought-companion, I at length--for
we men are so inevitably materialistic--embodied him, gave to him hands,
feet, a figure, all--as before, mine, yet not mine, a sort of saintly
replica of my sinfulness. For do not hands, feet, figure cry our deeds
as the watchman cries the hour in the night?

"So, I had the man. There he stood in my vision as you are now.

"Yes, he was there; but only when I sinned.

"When I worked and yielded myself up to the clear assertion of my
intellect, when I fought to give out the thoughts that lingered like
reluctant fish far down in the deep pools of my mind, when I wrestled
for beauty of diction and for nameless graces of expression, when I was
the author, I could not see him.

"But when I was the man, and lived the fables that I was afterwards to
write, then he was with me. And his face was as the face of one who is
wasted with grey grief.

"He came to me when I sinned, as if by my sins I did him grave injury.
And, allowing my imagination to range wildly, as you will say, I grew
gradually to feel as if each sin did indeed strike a grievous blow upon
his holy nature.

"This troubled me at last. I found myself continually brooding over the
strange idea. I was aware that if my friends could know I entertai