o it out of cruelty. He'd have to put me back. That's the way His laws
are made. So I'm going up to Wake Hill and live with Charlotte and
Jerry, and see if I can't get tired enough every day to sleep at night.
I couldn't keep on here. I couldn't. What we call civilization is too
sickening to me. I should simply go off my nut. And when you come to
that, it's an awful complication, besides the suffering of it. That I
shrink from, too. I'm talking a good deal, but actually it's the thing I
least want to do. I don't want a fuss."

Here he paused, wondered if he had more to say, thinking Dick must be
unusually dull, even for a poet, if he couldn't understand such a plain
state of things, and then took an irrational satisfaction in carefully
folding these last pages and putting them in the envelope with what he
had written first. He addressed the envelope to Dick, sealed and weighed
it, got up and stretched himself and felt distinctly better. He had, in
a way, confessed, and it was having the effect on him he had so sagely
anticipated. He could sleep to-night. And he did sleep. It was one of
the nights he used to have after long tramps about Wake Hill, when his
tired legs thrilled deliciously before they sank into a swoon of
nothingness.

In the morning, he leaped the chasm from four to six, a wakeful misery
of late, when he was accustomed to go over and over the last harassing
pages in his book of doubts. He did not wake until seven, and then it
was with a clear-eyed resumption of consciousness. And here he was,
exactly as he had found himself on other mornings when the bath of
oblivion had not been so deep. Here was his world, the world he was
trying to run away from, waiting for him in all its ordered hostilities.
Immediately it struck him full in the center that, instead of having
something less to brood upon by reason of his confession to Dick, he had
saddled himself with more. He had the letter itself to repent of. He had
given, not his unhappiness but his actual self away, and, no matter how
clearly Dick understood, he had conjured up another anguish in admitting
to his disordered inner world the lenses of another mind. This was only
a matter of a second's disconcerting thought. It was also immediately
clear to him that the letter must not go, and he spoke from his bedside
to the kitchen and gave orders that nothing should be mailed until he
came down. A contrite voice replied. The letters were mailed: that is,
the th