So indeed I was resolved. I raged monstrously. And above me,
abolishing the stars, triumphant over the yellow waning moon that
followed it below, the giant meteor towered up towards the zenith.

"Let me only kill!" I cried. "Let me only kill!"

So I shouted in my frenzy. I was in a fever that defied hunger
and fatigue; for a long time I had prowled over the heath towards
Lowchester talking to myself, and now that night had fully come I
was tramping homeward, walking the long seventeen miles without a
thought of rest. And I had eaten nothing since the morning.

I suppose I must count myself mad, but I can recall my ravings.

There were times when I walked weeping through that brightness that
was neither night nor day. There were times when I reasoned in a
topsy-turvy fashion with what I called the Spirit of All Things.
But always I spoke to that white glory in the sky.

"Why am I here only to suffer ignominies?" I asked. "Why have you
made me with pride that cannot be satisfied, with desires that
turn and rend me? Is it a jest, this world--a joke you play on your
guests? I--even I--have a better humor than that!"

"Why not learn from me a certain decency of mercy? Why not undo?
Have I ever tormented--day by day, some wretched worm--making
filth for it to trail through, filth that disgusts it, starving it,
bruising it, mocking it? Why should you? Your jokes are clumsy.
Try--try some milder fun up there; do you hear? Something that
doesn't hurt so infernally."

"You say this is your purpose--your purpose with me. You are making
something with me--birth pangs of a soul. Ah! How can I believe
you? You forget I have eyes for other things. Let my own case go,
but what of that frog beneath the cart-wheel, God?--and the bird
the cat had torn?"

And after such blasphemies I would fling out a ridiculous little
debating society hand. "Answer me that!"

A week ago it had been moonlight, white and black and hard across
the spaces of the park, but now the light was livid and full of
the quality of haze. An extraordinarily low white mist, not three
feet above the ground, drifted broodingly across the grass, and
the trees rose ghostly out of that phantom sea. Great and shadowy
and strange was the world that night, no one seemed abroad; I and my
little cracked voice drifted solitary through the silent mysteries.
Sometimes I argued as I have told, sometimes I tumbled along in
moody vacuity, sometimes my torment was vivid and ac