his cigar smoke.

"Nevertheless," he said, "this confessional business of yours has been
an excellent exercise. It has enabled me to get outside myself, to look
at myself as a Case. Now I can even see myself as a remote Case. That
I needn't bother about further.... So far as that goes, I think we have
done all that there is to be done."

"I shouldn't say that--quite--yet," said the doctor.

"I don't think I'm a subject for real psychoanalysis at all. I'm not
an overlaid sort of person. When I spread myself out there is not much
indication of a suppressed wish or of anything masked or buried of that
sort. What you get is a quite open and recognized discord of two sets of
motives."

The doctor considered. "Yes, I think that is true. Your LIBIDO is, I
should say, exceptionally free. Generally you are doing what you want to
do--overdoing, in fact, what you want to do and getting simply tired."

"Which is the theory I started with. I am a case of fatigue under
irritating circumstances with very little mental complication or
concealment."

"Yes," said the doctor. "I agree. You are not a case for psychoanalysis,
strictly speaking, at all. You are in open conflict with yourself, upon
moral and social issues. Practically open. Your problems are problems of
conscious conduct."

"As I said."

"Of what renunciations you have consciously to make."

Sir Richmond did not answer that....

"This pilgrimage of ours," he said, presently, "has made for
magnanimity. This day particularly has been a good day. When we stood on
this old wall here in the sunset I seemed to be standing outside myself
in an immense still sphere of past and future. I stood with my feet
upon the Stone Age and saw myself four thousand years away, and all my
distresses as very little incidents in that perspective. Away there in
London the case is altogether different; after three hours or so of
the Committee one concentrates into one little inflamed moment of
personality. There is no past any longer, there is no future, there is
only the rankling dispute. For all those three hours, perhaps, I have
been thinking of just what I had to say, just how I had to say it,
just how I looked while I said it, just how much I was making myself
understood, how I might be misunderstood, how I might be misrepresented,
challenged, denied. One draws in more and more as one is used up. At
last one is reduced to a little, raw, bleeding, desperately fighting,
pin-point of