During the first twenty-four hours the fear of Ascham's alienist
dogged him; and as that subsided, it was replaced by the
exasperating sense that his avowal had made no impression on the
District Attorney. Evidently, if he had been going to look into
the case, Allonby would have been heard from before now. . . .
And that mocking invitation to supper showed clearly enough how
little the story had impressed him!

Granice was overcome by the futility of any farther attempt to
inculpate himself. He was chained to life--a "prisoner of
consciousness." Where was it he had read the phrase? Well, he
was learning what it meant. In the glaring night-hours, when his
brain seemed ablaze, he was visited by a sense of his fixed
identity, of his irreducible, inexpugnable SELFNESS, keener, more
insidious, more unescapable, than any sensation he had ever
known. He had not guessed that the mind was capable of such
intricacies of self-realization, of penetrating so deep into its
own dark windings. Often he woke from his brief snatches of
sleep with the feeling that something material was clinging to
him, was on his hands and face, and in his throat--and as his
brain cleared he understood that it was the sense of his own
loathed personality that stuck to him like some thick viscous
substance.

Then, in the first morning hours, he would rise and look out of
his window at the awakening activities of the street--at the
street-cleaners, the ash-cart drivers, and the other dingy
workers flitting hurriedly by through the sallow winter light.
Oh, to be one of them--any of them--to take his chance in any of
their skins! They were the toilers--the men whose lot was