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256 him a little, and from having seen something of the effect of his personality on others.

He felt quite definitely that no one in the world could feel or even think alone. And then there was the notion that if one tried to think with the mind without taking the body into account one got all balled up. True conscious life built itself up like a pyramid. First the body and mind of a beloved one must come into one's thinking and feeling and then, in some mystic way, the bodies and minds of all the other people in the world must come in, must come sweeping in like a great wind or something of that sort.

Is all this a little tangled up to you who read my story? It may not be. It may be that your minds are more clear than my own and that what I take to be so difficult will be very simple to you.

However, I have to bring up to you just what I can find after diving down into this sea of motives and impulses I admit I don't rightly understand.

The hunchback girl felt—or is it my own fancy colouring what she said? it doesn't really matter. The thing to get at 1s what the man Edgar Wilson felt.

He felt, I fancy, that in the field of poetry he had something to express that could never be expressed until he had found a woman who could, in a peculiar and absolute way, give herself in the world of the flesh, and that then there was to be a marriage out of which beauty would come for all people. He had to find the woman who had that power, and the power had to be untainted by self-interest, I fancy. A profound egotist, you see, and he thought he had found what he needed in the wife of the Kansas druggist.

He had found her and had done something to her. What it was I can't quite make out, except that she was absolutely and wholly happy with him in a strangely inexpressive sort of way.

Trying to speak of him and his influence on others is rather like trying to walk on a tight rope stretched between two tall buildings above a crowded street. A cry from below, a laugh, the honk of an automobile horn, and down one goes into nothingness. One simply becomes ridiculous.

He wanted, it seems, to condense the flesh and the spirit of himself and his woman into his poems. You will remember that in one of the things of his I have quoted he speaks of condensing, of