“He lashed his soul with laughter to prevent it falling asleep.  He lost his wife a series of excellent servants by knocking at the door as a total stranger, and asking if Mr. Smith lived there and what kind of a man he was.  The London general servant is not used to the master indulging in such transcendental ironies.  And it was found impossible to explain to her that he did it in order to feel the same interest in his own affairs that he always felt in other people’s.

“`I know there’s a fellow called Smith,’ he said in his rather weird way, `living in one of the tall houses in this terrace.  I know he is really happy, and yet I can never catch him at it.’

“Sometimes he would, of a sudden, treat his wife with a kind of paralyzed politeness, like a young stranger struck with love at first sight.  Sometimes he would extend this poetic fear to the very furniture; would seem to apologize to the chair he sat on, and climb the staircase as cautiously as a cragsman, to renew in himself the sense of their skeleton of reality.  Every stair is a ladder and every stool a leg, he said.  And at other times he would play the stranger exactly in the opposite sense, and would enter by another way, so as to feel like a thief and a robber.  He would break and violate his own home, as he had done with me that night.  It was near morning before I could tear myself from this queer confidence of the Man Who Would Not Die, and as I shook hands with him on the doorstep the last load of fog was lifting, and rifts of daylight revealed the stairway of irregular street levels that looked like the end of the world.

“It will be enough for many to say that I had passed a night with a maniac.  What other term, it will be said, could be applied to such a being?  A man who reminds himself that he is married by pretending not to be married!  A man who tries to covet his own goods instead of his neighbor’s!  On this I have but one word to say, and I feel it of my honour to say it, though no one understands.  I believe the maniac was one of those who do not merely come, but are sent; sent like a great gale upon ships by Him who made His angels winds and His messengers a flaming fire.  This, at least, I know for certain.  Whether such men have laughed or wept, we have laughed at their laughter as much as at their weeping.  Whether they cursed or blessed the world, they have never fitted it.  It is true that men have shrunk from the sting of a great satirist as if from the sting of an adder.  But it is equally true that men flee from the embrace of a great optimist as from the embrace of a bear.  Nothing brings down more curses than a real benediction.  For the goodness of good things, like the badness of bad things, is a prodigy past speech; it is to be pictured rather than spoken.  We shall have gone deeper than the deeps of heaven and grown older than the oldest angels before we feel, even in its first faint vibrations, the everlasting violence of that double passion with which God hates and loves the world.—­I am, yours faithfully,
                                            “Raymond Percy.”