r persons. Out here--I mean
here round the world--before you've done with them--there's a thousand
million people--men and women."

"Oh! what does that matter to me?" said I.

"Everything," said Tarvrille. "At least--it ought to."

He stopped and held out his hand. "Good-bye, Stratton--good luck to you!
Good-bye."

"Yes," I said. "Good-bye."

I turned away from him. The image of Mary crying as a child cries
suddenly blinded me and blotted out the world.

Sec. 2

I want to give you as clearly as I can some impression of the mental
states that followed this passion and this collapse. It seems to me one
of the most extraordinary aspects of all that literature of speculative
attack which is called psychology, that there is no name and no
description at all of most of the mental states that make up life.
Psychology, like sociology, is still largely in the scholastic stage, it
is ignorant and intellectual, a happy refuge for the lazy industry of
pedants; instead of experience and accurate description and analysis it
begins with the rash assumption of elements and starts out upon
ridiculous syntheses. Who with a sick soul would dream of going to a
psychologist?...

Now here was I with a mind sore and inflamed. I did not clearly
understand what had happened to me. I had blundered, offended, entangled
myself; and I had no more conception than a beast in a bog what it was
had got me, or the method or even the need of escape. The desires and
passionate excitements, the anger and stress and strain and suspicion of
the last few months had worn deep grooves in my brain, channels without
end or issue, out of which it seemed impossible to keep my thoughts. I
had done dishonorable things, told lies, abused the confidence of a
friend. I kept wrestling with these intolerable facts. If some momentary
distraction released me for a time, back I would fall presently before I
knew what was happening, and find myself scheming once more to reverse
the accomplished, or eloquently restating things already intolerably
overdiscussed in my mind, justifying the unjustifiable or avenging
defeat. I would dream again and again of some tremendous appeal to Mary,
some violent return and attack upon the situation....

One very great factor in my mental and moral distress was the uncertain
values of nearly every aspect of the case. There is an invincible sense
of wild rightness about passionate love that no reasoning and no
training will ever a