Just a line.  Mina sleeps soundly and her breathing is regular.  Her forehead is puckered up into little wrinkles, as though she thinks even in her sleep.  She is still too pale, but does not look so haggard as she did this morning.  Tomorrow will, I hope, mend all this.  She will be herself at home in Exeter.  Oh, but I am sleepy!

DR. SEWARD’S DIARY

1 October.—­I am puzzled afresh about Renfield.  His moods change so rapidly that I find it difficult to keep touch of them, and as they always mean something more than his own well-being, they form a more than interesting study.  This morning, when I went to see him after his repulse of Van Helsing, his manner was that of a man commanding destiny.  He was, in fact, commanding destiny, subjectively.  He did not really care for any of the things of mere earth, he was in the clouds and looked down on all the weaknesses and wants of us poor mortals.

I thought I would improve the occasion and learn something, so I asked him, “What about the flies these times?”

He smiled on me in quite a superior sort of way, such a smile as would have become the face of Malvolio, as he answered me, “The fly, my dear sir, has one striking feature.  It’s wings are typical of the aerial powers of the psychic faculties.  The ancients did well when they typified the soul as a butterfly!”

I thought I would push his analogy to its utmost logically, so I said quickly, “Oh, it is a soul you are after now, is it?”

His madness foiled his reason, and a puzzled look spread over his face as, shaking his head with a decision which I had but seldom seen in him.

He said, “Oh, no, oh no!  I want no souls.  Life is all I want.”  Here he brightened up.  “I am pretty indifferent about it at present.  Life is all right.  I have all I want.  You must get a new patient, doctor, if you wish to study zoophagy!”

This puzzled me a little, so I drew him on.  “Then you command life.  You are a god, I suppose?”

He smiled with an ineffably benign superiority.  “Oh no!  Far be it from me to arrogate to myself the attributes of the Deity.  I am not even concerned in His especially spiritual doings.  If I may state my intellectual position I am, so far as concerns things purely terrestrial, somewhat in the position which Enoch occupied spiritually!”

This was a poser to me.  I could not at the moment recall Enoch’s appositeness, so I had to ask a simple question, though I felt that by so doing I was lowering myself in the eyes of the lunatic.  “And why with Enoch?”

“Because he walked with God.”

I could not see the analogy, but did not like to admit it, so I harked back to what he had denied.  “So you don’t care about life and you don’t want souls.  Why not?” I put my question quickly and somewhat sternly, on purpose to disconcert him.