The thought of self-destruction recurred to him; but again his flesh recoiled.  He yearned for death from other hands, but he could never take it from his own.  And, aside from his insuperable physical reluctance, another motive restrained him.  He was possessed by the dogged desire to establish the truth of his story.  He refused to be swept aside as an irresponsible dreamer—­even if he had to kill himself in the end, he would not do so before proving to society that he had deserved death from it.

He began to write long letters to the papers; but after the first had been published and commented on, public curiosity was quelled by a brief statement from the District Attorney’s office, and the rest of his communications remained unprinted.  Ascham came to see him, and begged him to travel.  Robert Denver dropped in, and tried to joke him out of his delusion; till Granice, mistrustful of their motives, began to dread the reappearance of Dr. Stell, and set a guard on his lips.  But the words he kept back engendered others and still others in his brain.  His inner self became a humming factory of arguments, and he spent long hours reciting and writing down elaborate statements of his crime, which he constantly retouched and developed.  Then gradually his activity languished under the lack of an audience, the sense of being buried beneath deepening drifts of indifference.  In a passion of resentment he swore that he would prove himself a murderer, even if he had to commit another crime to do it; and for a sleepless night or two the thought flamed red on his darkness.  But daylight dispelled it.  The determining impulse was lacking and he hated too promiscuously to choose his victim...  So he was thrown back on the unavailing struggle to impose the truth of his story.  As fast as one channel closed on him he tried to pierce another through the sliding sands of incredulity.  But every issue seemed blocked, and the whole human race leagued together to cheat one man of the right to die.

Thus viewed, the situation became so monstrous that he lost his last shred of self-restraint in contemplating it.  What if he were really the victim of some mocking experiment, the centre of a ring of holiday-makers jeering at a poor creature in its blind dashes against the solid walls of consciousness?  But, no—­men were not so uniformly cruel:  there were flaws in the close surface of their indifference, cracks of weakness and pity here and there...

Granice began to think that his mistake lay in having appealed to persons more or less familiar with his past, and to whom the visible conformities of his life seemed a final disproof of its one fierce secret deviation.  The general tendency was to take for the whole of life the slit seen between the blinders of habit:  and in his walk down that narrow vista Granice cut a correct enough figure.  To a vision free to follow his whole orbit his story would be more intelligible:  it would be easier to convince a chance idler in the street than the trained intelligence hampered by a sense of his antecedents.  This idea shot up in him with the tropic luxuriance of each new seed of thought, and he began to walk the streets, and to frequent out-of-the-way chop-houses and bars in his search for the impartial stranger to whom he should disclose himself.