ering, goatish in odour, unwashed and foul! Is it I? Is it I? And the
anguished angel who weeps to look upon him. Is it I? Woe, woe is me, for
I am each and both of these!

Oh, goat-hoofed devil in man, and buffeted aspirant soul! Oh, divine
God-man, who art myself, and whom I with my own hands do hourly crucify,
whom I do scourge and crown with thorns and spit upon!

Shall a man think thus but once only--shall he feed this burning iron
in his breast but one sole time, and then go gaily afield in search
of fresh agonies? Even so, and not once again only, but his lifetime
through. This is why it is written that though you bray a fool in a
mortar among bruised wheat with a pestle, yet will not his folly depart
from him.

Bowed earthward, with garments that stink of rain-soaked dye drying
in the sunshine, with swollen features and boots that suck at the
flagstones, bristled and bloated and bleared, I go by you. Had I never
a concupiscence for honour? Is there no Christ-half that walks within me
towards the place of rottenness and dead men's bones?

Back to the vision again, not merely remembering, but living it all.

Sick nausea, rising faintly yet heavily on the senses, swimming upward,
as it were, along with a half-drowned rebeginning of life and the
cognizance of things; deep loathing, and eyes like new-cast musket-balls
for heat and weight; a frowsy air; a mouth like burned leather lined
with vile odours. Forget it all in a mere instinct of distaste. Sink
down with the sick wave. Swim down the sick wave in floating circles.
Sway here and swing there at the bottom of the whirlpool, and up again
towards the light which heaves slowly on the eye as it used to do at
the upward turn after a dive, when the sunlight shone through the yellow
water of the lock. Then on a sudden--daylight; and then, like a bursting
shell on the brain, the truth.

No use for the incredulous oath that the truth is false.

'My God! it isn't--it can't be!'

It can be--and it is. It _has_ been, and no mere episode of an eternity
will wipe it out or can undo it There is the dirty blind torn away from
one corner of the roller; there is the peeling paper on the wall, and
the wall leprous where the paper has fallen away from it. Here, under
his cheek, is the yellow malodorous pillow.

The sick brain cannot think; the foul mouth seems to taste of his own
soiled soul.

And the woman, when he turns his leaden head, lying there, flushed--a
girl of