"What about souls?"

It was evident then that my surmise had been correct. Unconscious
cerebration was doing its work, even with the lunatic. I determined
to have the matter out.

"What about them yourself?" I asked.

He did not reply for a moment but looked all around him, and up and
down, as though he expected to find some inspiration for an answer.

"I don't want any souls!" he said in a feeble, apologetic way. The
matter seemed preying on his mind, and so I determined to use it, to
"be cruel only to be kind." So I said, "You like life, and you want
life?"

"Oh yes! But that is all right. You needn't worry about that!"

"But," I asked, "how are we to get the life without getting the soul
also?"

This seemed to puzzle him, so I followed it up, "A nice time you'll
have some time when you're flying out here, with the souls of
thousands of flies and spiders and birds and cats buzzing and
twittering and moaning all around you. You've got their lives, you
know, and you must put up with their souls!"

Something seemed to affect his imagination, for he put his fingers to
his ears and shut his eyes, screwing them up tightly just as a small
boy does when his face is being soaped. There was something pathetic
in it that touched me. It also gave me a lesson, for it seemed that
before me was a child, only a child, though the features were worn,
and the stubble on the jaws was white. It was evident that he was
undergoing some process of mental disturbance, and knowing how his
past moods had interpreted things seemingly foreign to himself, I
thought I would enter into his mind as well as I could and go with him.

The first step was to restore confidence, so I asked him, speaking
pretty loud so that he would hear me through his closed ears, "Would
you like some sugar to get your flies around again?"

He seemed to wake up all at once, and shook his head. With a laugh he
replied, "Not much! Flies are poor things, after all!" After a pause
he added, "But I don't want their souls buzzing round me, all the
same."

"Or spiders?" I went on.

"Blow spiders! What's the use of spiders? There isn't anything in
them to eat or . . ." He stopped suddenly as though reminded of a
forbidden topic.

"So, so!" I thought to myself, "this is the second time he has
suddenly stopped at the word 'drink'. What does it mean?"

Renfield seemed himself aware of having made a lapse, for he hurried
on, as though to distract m