The only part I heard, however, touched my imagination

vividly. Speaking of suicides, the lecturer said that self-murder was

no escape from the miseries of the present, but only a preparation of

greater sorrow for the future. Suicides, he declared, cannot shirk

their responsibilities so easily. They must return to take up life

exactly where they laid it so violently down, but with the added pain

and punishment of their weakness. Many of them wander the earth in

unspeakable misery till they can reclothe themselves in the body of

someone else—generally a lunatic, or weak-minded person, who cannot

resist the hideous obsession. This is their only means of escape.

Surely a weird and horrible idea! I wish I had slept all the time and

not heard it at all. My mind is morbid enough without such ghastly

fancies. Such mischievous propaganda should be stopped by the police.

I’ll write to the Times and suggest it.

Good idea!

I walked home through Greek Street, Soho, and imagined that a

hundred years had slipped back into place and De Quincey was still

there, haunting the night with invocations to his “just, subtle, and

mighty” drug. His vast dreams seemed to hover not very far away. Once

started in my brain, the pictures refused to go away; and I saw him

sleeping in that cold, tenantless mansion with the strange little waif

who was afraid of its ghosts, both together in the shadows under a

single horseman’s cloak; or wandering in the companionship of the

spectral Anne; or, later still, on his way to the eternal rendezvous

at the foot of Great Titchfield Street, the rendezvous she never was

able to keep. What an unutterable gloom, what an untold horror of

sorrow and suffering comes over me as I try to realise something of

what that man—boy he then was—must have taken into his lonely heart.

As I came up the alley I saw a light in the top window, and a head

and shoulders thrown in an exaggerated shadow upon the blind. I

wondered what the son could be doing up there at such an hour.

Nov. 5.—This morning, while writing, someone came up the creaking

stairs and knocked cautiously at my door. Thinking it was the

landlady, I said, “Come in! ” The knock was repeated, and I cried

louder, “Come in, come in!” But no one turned the handle, and I

continued my writing with a vexed “Well, stay out, then!” under my

breath. Went on writing? I tried to, but my thoughts had suddenly

dried up at their source. I could not set down a single word. It was a

dark, yellow-fog morning, and there was little enough inspiration in

the air as it was, but that stupid.woman standing just outside my door

waiting to be told again to come in roused a spirit of vexation that

filled my head to the exclusion of all else. At last I jumped up and

opened the door myself.

“What do you want, and why in the world don’t you come in?” I cried

out. But the words dropped into empty air. There was no one there. The

fog poured up the dingy staircase in deep yellow coils, but there was

no sign of a human being anywhere.

I slammed the door, with imprecations upon the house and its

noises, and went back to my work. A few minutes later Emily came in

with a letter.

“Were you or Mrs.