“The cause must be sought in the sphere of the supernatural, a province wherein reason, education and culture protest against my wandering.” Pausing the young man strove to recall the scenes and sensations of the previous night, but in vain.
“It is useless for me to struggle to bring back the vanished state of feeling that possessed me last evening. It refuses to pass before the spectrum of my mind.
“It is ever thus while the normal condition of my mental faculties exists. I always fail to catch the fleeting shadow of that distorting spectre that haunts my spirit with its degrading, masterful influence.
“Could I but hold that sensation that steals upon me, while my mental powers are yet unimpaired by its presence, I might make a diagnosis of the disease, analyze the cause and produce the remedy, but my attempts are always futile. I fail to reproduce the feeling that was all-pervading a few short hours before the current of my mind returned to its accustomed channel.”
The helplessness and baffled look upon the man’s face as he ended this self-communion was piteous. Throwing himself into a chair and covering his face with his hands, he cried almost with a moan:
“To what depth of degradation, brutality and crime may I not be carried while actuated by a power foreign and antagonistic to all that Christianity, morality and education have imparted to me?”
“My God! How I had hoped that time and marriage would cause a diminution in the power of these strange spells and the frequency of their visits, until, at last, I might be freed from a thralldom repugnant to all my better self.”
“Vain that hoped for release! Rather do the mysterious visitations increase in frequency, and alas! also in power.”
“Like insidious waves that sap and undermine the foundation of some massive granite cliff, the delusive tide recedes but to return, each succeeding visit adding to the inroad already made. Though small may be the gain, they never once relax their firm grip upon the headway won before, until the toppling mass comes crashing from its majestic height, vanquished by and victim of unremitting insidiousness.”
“So I find with each recurrence of the tide of the strange spell that submerges me. That granite cliff of Christianity whereon I builded my castle of morality, that bastion of education, those redoubts of refinement, culture, aesthetics, deemed by me as creating an impregnable fortress wherein by the aid of civilization I should find secure shelter, are trembling and toppling, undermined by the waves of that inexplicable, relentless influence.”