together to cheat one man of the right to die.

Thus viewed, the situation became so monstrous that he lost his
last shred of self-restraint in contemplating it. What if he
were really the victim of some mocking experiment, the centre of
a ring of holiday-makers jeering at a poor creature in its blind
dashes against the solid walls of consciousness? But, no--men
were not so uniformly cruel: there were flaws in the close
surface of their indifference, cracks of weakness and pity here
and there. . .

Granice began to think that his mistake lay in having appealed to
persons more or less familiar with his past, and to whom the
visible conformities of his life seemed a final disproof of its
one fierce secret deviation. The general tendency was to take
for the whole of life the slit seen between the blinders of
habit: and in his walk down that narrow vista Granice cut a
correct enough figure. To a vision free to follow his whole
orbit his story would be more intelligible: it would be easier to
convince a chance idler in the street than the trained
intelligence hampered by a sense of his antecedents. This idea
shot up in him with the tropic luxuriance of each new seed of
thought, and he began to walk the streets, and to frequent out-
of-the-way chop-houses and bars in his search for the impartial
stranger to whom he should disclose himself.

At first every face looked encouragement; but at the crucial
moment he always held back. So much was at stake, and it was so
essential that his first choice should be decisive. He dreaded
stupidity, timidity, intolerance. The imaginative eye, the