"These affections, I had read, are sometimes transitory and sometimes
obstinate. I had read of cases in which the appearance, at first
harmless, had, step by step, degenerated into something direful and
insupportable, and ended by wearing its victim out. Still as I stood
there, but for my bestial companion, quite alone, I tried to comfort
myself by repeating again and again the assurance, 'the thing is purely
disease, a well-known physical affection, as distinctly as small-pox or
neuralgia. Doctors are all agreed on that, philosophy demonstrates it. I
must not be a fool. I've been sitting up too late, and I daresay my
digestion is quite wrong, and, with God's help, I shall be all right,
and this is but a symptom of nervous dyspepsia.' Did I believe all this?
Not one word of it, no more than any other miserable being ever did who
is once seized and riveted in this satanic captivity. Against my
convictions, I might say my knowledge, I was simply bullying myself into
a false courage.

"I now walked homeward. I had only a few hundred yards to go. I had
forced myself into a sort of resignation, but I had not got over the
sickening shock and the flurry of the first certainty of my misfortune.

"I made up my mind to pass the night at home. The brute moved close
beside me, and I fancied there was the sort of anxious drawing toward
the house, which one sees in tired horses or dogs, sometimes as they
come toward home.

"I was afraid to go into town, I was afraid of any one's seeing and
recognizing me. I was conscious of an irrepressible agitation in my
manner. Also, I was afraid of any violent change in my habits, such as
going to a place of amusement, or walking from home in order to fatigue
myself. At the hall door it waited till I mounted the steps, and when