still others in his brain. His inner self became a humming factory
of arguments, and he spent long hours reciting and writing down
elaborate statements of his crime, which he constantly retouched and
developed. Then gradually his activity languished under the lack of
an audience, the sense of being buried beneath deepening drifts of
indifference. In a passion of resentment he swore that he would
prove himself a murderer, even if he had to commit another crime to
do it; and for a sleepless night or two the thought flamed red on
his darkness. But daylight dispelled it. The determining impulse was
lacking and he hated too promiscuously to choose his victim... So
he was thrown back on the unavailing struggle to impose the truth of
his story. As fast as one channel closed on him he tried to pierce
another through the sliding sands of incredulity. But every issue
seemed blocked, and the whole human race leagued 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