f simple things, living a simple life, was just now becoming
irritating. He must go to London, Paris--do things. He couldn't loaf
this way. It mattered little that he could not work. He must try. This
isolation was terrible.

There followed six months spent in Chicago in which he painted not one
picture that was satisfactory to him, that was not messed into
nothingness by changes and changes and changes. There were then three
months in the mountains of Tennessee because someone told him of a
wonderfully curative spring in a delightful valley where the spring came
as a dream of color and the expense of living was next to nothing. There
were four months of summer in southern Kentucky on a ridge where the air
was cool, and after that five months on the Gulf of Mexico, at Biloxi,
in Mississippi, because some comfortable people in Kentucky and
Tennessee told Angela of this delightful winter resort farther South.
All this time Eugene's money, the fifteen hundred dollars he had when he
left Blackwood, several sums of two hundred, one hundred and fifty and
two hundred and fifty, realized from pictures sold in New York and Paris
during the fall and winter following his Paris exhibition, and two
hundred which had come some months afterward from a fortuitous sale by
M. Charles of one of his old New York views, had been largely
dissipated. He still had five hundred dollars, but with no pictures
being sold and none painted he was in a bad way financially in so far as
the future was concerned. He could possibly return to Alexandria with
Angela and live cheaply there for another six months, but because of the
Frieda incident both he and she objected to it. Angela was afraid of
Frieda and was resolved that she would not go there so long as Frieda
was in the town, and Eugene was ashamed because of the light a return
would throw on his fading art prospects. Blackwood was out of the
question to him. They had lived on her parents long enough. If he did
not get better he must soon give up this art idea entirely, for he could
not live on trying to paint.

He began to think that he was possessed--obsessed of a devil--and that
some people were pursued by evil spirits, fated by stars, doomed from
their birth to failure or accident. How did the astrologer in New York
know that he was to have four years of bad luck? He had seen three of
them already. Why did a man who read his palm in Chicago once say that
his hand showed two periods of disaster