ay, you know. This is an hour-by-hour torture you've set
out to grin and bear and live through. You'll never make the grade, if
you don't take cognizance in advance. The road's devilishly steep and
icy, and the corners are bad. What's more, there's no end to it; the
crest's never in sight. Clamp your chains on and get into low....
Steady!

"But, of course," whispered my familiar demon, "there's probably an
easier way round. Why attempt the impossible? Think what you've done for
Susan! Gratitude, my dear sir--affectionate gratitude--is a long step in
the right direction ... if it is the right direction. I don't say it is;
I merely suggest, _en passant_, that it may be. Suppose, for example,
that Susan----"

"Damn you!" I spat out, jumping from my chair. "You contemptible swine!"

Congested blood whined in my ears like a faint jeering laughter. I paced
the room, raging--only to sink down again, exhausted, my face and hands
clammy.

"What a hideous exhibition," I said, distinctly addressing a grotesque
porcelain Buddha on the mantelpiece. Contrary, I believe, to my
expectations, he did not reply. My familiar demon forestalled him.

"If by taking a merely conventional attitude," he murmured, "you defeat
the natural flowering of two lives----? Who are you to decide that the
voice of Nature is not also the voice of God? Supposing, for the moment,
that God is other than a poetic expression. If her eyes didn't haunt
you," continued my familiar demon, "or a certain way she has of turning
her head, like a poised poppy...."

As he droned on within me, the mantelpiece blurred and thinned to the
blue haze of a distant Tuscan hill, and the little porcelain Buddha sat
upon this hill, very far off now and changed oddly to the semblance of a
tiny huddled town. We were climbing along a white road toward that far
hill, that tiny town.

"Ambo," she was saying, "that isn't East Rock--it's Monte Senario. And
this isn't Birch Street--it's the Faenzan Way. How do you do it,
Ambo--you wonderful magician! Just with a wave of your wand you change
the world for me; you give me--all this!"

A bee droned at my ear: "Gratitude, my dear sir. Affectionate gratitude.
A long step."

"Damn you!" I whimpered.... But the grotesque porcelain Buddha was
there again, on the mantelshelf. The creases in his little fat belly
disgusted me; they were loathsome. I rose. "At least," I said to him, "I
can live without _you_!" Then I seized him and shattered