however perfect, indicates by its very name something which may be disturbed.  He thought over, idly, various means of unlawful exit from the world, and applied them to his own case.  He decided against the means employed by the desperate bank cashier; he decided against the fiery draught of acid swallowed by a love-distracted girl; he decided against the leap from a ferry-boat taken by an unknown man, whose body lay unidentified in the morgue; he decided against illuminating gas, which had released from the woes of life a man and his three children; he thought rather favorably of charcoal; he thought also rather favorably of morphine; he thought more favorably still of the opening of a vein, employed by fastidious old Romans who had enough of feast and gladiators and life generally and wished for a chance to leave the entertainment.  All this was the merest idleness of suggestion, a species of rather ghastly amusement, it is true, but none the less amusement, of an unemployed and melancholy mind.  But suddenly, something new and hitherto unexperienced was over him, a mood which he had never imagined, a possibility which he had never grasped.  His brain, tried to the extreme by genuine misery, tried in addition by dangerous suggestion, lost its perfect poise for the time.  A mighty hunger and thirst—­a more than hunger and thirst—­a ravening appetite, a passion beyond all passions which he had ever known, was upon him, had him in its clutches.  He knew for the first time the most monstrous and irresistible passion of the race, the passion for release from mortal existence, the passion for death.  At that moment he felt, and probably felt truly, that had he been in dire peril, he would not have lifted a finger in self-preservation.  He turned his eyes inward upon himself with greed for his own life, for his own blood, and back of that was the ravening thirst for release from the world and the flesh and the miseries which appertained to them, as one suffocating might thirst for air.  He realized suddenly himself, stifling and agonizing, behind a window which he had no need to wait for an overruling Providence to open, which was not too heavy for his own mortal strength, which he could open himself.  He realized that whatever lay outside was outside; it was air outside this air, misery outside this particular phase which was driving him mad.  His imagination dwelling upon the different means of suicide, now became judicial.  He thought seriously upon the drawbacks to one, the advantages of another.  Then since the man was essentially unselfish and fond of his own flesh and blood, he began to reflect upon the horror of a confessed suicide to them.  He began to study the feasibility of a suicide forever undiscovered.  He began to plan how the thing might distress his family as little as possible.  His cigar went out as he sat and studied.  The furnace fire was low and the room grew cold.  He never noticed it.  He studied and studied the best means of suicide, the best means of concealing it, and all the time the greed for it was increasing until his veins seemed to run with a liquid fire of monstrous passion, the passion of a mortal man for his own immolation upon fate, and all the time that sense of intolerable suffocation by existence itself, by the air of the world, increased.