nevertheless
stirred and troubled, suddenly awoke to the fact that he had had elements
of greatness....

My feelings in those first days at Santa Barbara may be likened, indeed,
to those of a man who has passed through a terrible accident that has
deprived him of sight or hearing, and which he wishes to forget. What I
was most conscious of then was an aching sense of loss--an ache that by
degrees became a throbbing pain as life flowed back into me, re-inflaming
once more my being with protest and passion, arousing me to revolt
against the fate that had overtaken me. I even began at moments to feel a
fierce desire to go back and take up again the fight from which I had
been so strangely removed--removed by the agency of things still obscure.
I might get Nancy yet, beat down her resistance, overcome her, if only I
could be near her and see her. But even in the midst of these surges of
passion I was conscious of the birth of a new force I did not understand,
and which I resented, that had arisen to give battle to my passions and
desires. This struggle was not mentally reflected as a debate between
right and wrong, as to whether I should or should not be justified in
taking Nancy if I could get her: it seemed as though some new and small
yet dogged intruder had forced an entrance into me, an insignificant
pigmy who did not hesitate to bar the pathway of the reviving giant of my
desires. These contests sapped my strength. It seemed as though in my
isolation I loved Nancy, I missed her more than ever, and the flavour she
gave to life.

Then Hermann Krebs began to press himself on me. I use the word as
expressive of those early resentful feelings,--I rather pictured him then
as the personification of an hostile element in the universe that had
brought about my miseries and accomplished my downfall; I attributed the
disagreeable thwarting of my impulses to his agency; I did not wish to
think of him, for he stood somehow for a vague future I feared to
contemplate. Yet the illusion of his presence, once begun, continued to
grow upon me, and I find myself utterly unable to describe that struggle
in which he seemed to be fighting as against myself for my confidence;
that process whereby he gradually grew as real to me as though he still
lived--until I could almost hear his voice and see his smile. At moments
I resisted wildly, as though my survival depended on it; at other moments
he seemed to bring me peace. One day I recalled as