THE BACILLUS OF BEAUTY
CHAPTER I.
THE METAMORPHOSIS.
NEW YORK, Sunday, Dec. 16.
I am going to set down as calmly and fully as I can a plain statement of all that has happened since I came to New York.
I shall not trim details, nor soften the facts to humour my own amazement, nor try to explain the marvel that I do not pretend to understand.
I begin at the beginning—at the plunge into fairy tale and miracle that I made, after living twenty-five years of baldest prose, when I met Helen Winship here.
Why, I had dragged her to school on a sled when she was a child. I watched her grow up. For years I saw her nearly every day at the State University in the West that already seems so unreal, so far away, I loved her.
Man, I knew her face better than I knew my own! Yet when I met her here—when I saw my promised wife, who had kissed me good-by only last June—I did not recognise her. I looked full into her great eyes and thought she was a stranger; hesitated even when she called my name. It's a miracle! Or a lie, or a wild dream; or I am going crazy. The thing will not be believed. And yet it's true.
This is my calmness! If I could but think it might be a tremendous blunder out of which I would sometime wake into verity! But there has been no mistake; I have not been dreaming unless I am dreaming now.