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 wind-
ings. 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 pitied--the victims wept
over and ranted about by altruists and economists; and how gladly he
would have taken up the load of any one of them, if only he might
have shaken off his own! But, no--the iron circle of consciousness
held them too: each one was hand-cuffed to his own hideous ego. Why
wish to be any one man rather than another? The only absolute good
was not to be ... And Flint, coming in to draw his bath, would ask
if he preferred his eggs scrambled or poached that morning?

On the fifth day he wrote a long urgent letter to Allonby; and for
the succeeding two days he had the occupation of waiting for an
answer. He hardly stirred from his rooms, in his fear of missing the
letter by a moment; but would the District Attorney write, or send a
representative: a policeman, a "secret agent," or some other
mysterious emissary of the law?