Yes, I was driven to thoughts of murder. It shows how the first false step leads down and down, to crime and even to death. Oh never, never, gentle reader, take that first False Step. Who knows to what it may lead!
“One false Step is never retreived.” Gray—On a Favorite Cat.
I reflected also on how the woman in the book had ruined her life with a letter. “The written word does not change,” she had said. “It remains always, embodying a dead truth and giving it apparent life.”
“Apparent life” was exactly what my letter had given to H. Frankenstein. That was what I called him, in my agony. I felt that if only I had never written the Letter there would have been no trouble. And another awful thought came to me: Was there an H after all? Could there be an H?
Once the French teacher had taken us to the theater in New York, and a woman sitting on a chair and covered with a sheet, had brought a man out of a perfectly empty Cabinet, by simply willing to do it. The Cabinet was empty, for four respectible looking men went up and examined it, and one even measured it with a Tape-measure.
She had materialised him, out of nothing.
And while I had had no Cabinet, there are many things in this world “that we do not dream of in our Philosophy.” Was H. a real person, or a creature of my disordered brain? In plain and simple language, could there be such a Person?
I feared not.
And if there was no H, really, and I married him, where would I be?
There was a ball at the Club that night, and the Familey all went. No one came to say good-night to me, and by half past ten I was alone with my misery. I knew Carter Brooks would be at the ball, and H also, very likely, dancing around as agreably as if he really existed, and I had not made him up.