myself, thinking of their author in an impatient and even cruel frame of mind, I soon realized on what dangerous ground I stood. Were we so different, was I so much more the success that I was free from his infection?

But the stronger the language I used against him, the more ruthlessly I pointed out his flaws, the more he appealed. Then he would hit me with something like this: "... Actually I've become a monster; insensible, indifferent and ignorant of the nuances of life which are its essence." You see, a man matures, even Cornball matures. Even suppose that he didn't know what he was saying; suppose that he was just reaching again for the phrase that would touch me; even so, I knew what he was saying. There was the danger. I had to quit it, quit him, quit the letters. I wanted to cry "Stop! that's enough. Do you want me to have to start looking at myself?"

Well, that was a revelation I refused to allow him. I wasn't going to give him the pleasure, if pleasure it would have been, to see the inside of "his correspondent." So I stopped. But his letters kept coming with their stale turns of phrase, the sort of thing a person can pluck by the armful from the slick magazines:

". . . Of cheerier note is my expanding capacity for Bacchus' balm,”—and then he went on: "... which, while its therapeutic rather than its somnolent effect is more keenly felt, heralds the death of the malaise which has plagued me these many years and my new birth of freedom to destroy myself completely." Oh, the pathetic epithets and twisted constructions!

I kept reading his letters because I expected every one to be the last. I thought he must finally give it up, and I wanted to know how he'd do it. It was bruising my own flesh to read him, but on I went. I even tried a different tactic to silence him once and for all. I sent him a post card with one sentence on it: "I am too busy to write." Surely a sentence like that would be more vicious, in its effect on him, than anything else I could say? But with a sudden clear vision of matters, he replied immediately:

"... How could you possibly be too busy to write? Writing being your crust and disposable bottle."

There was something in this last that made me wonder if he weren't in fact toying with me. Was it possible that he knew more about my condition than I thought he did? What did he mean, "my disposable bottle"? Did he know, at last, some way of reaching me, of really reaching me? Was he being sly rather than stupid, and were all his idiotic, affected phrases calculated?

It seemed that perhaps they were. It seemed, even that he'd taken up a thickly ironic tone with me.

For a fact, so few persons would appreciate the nuances so fundamental to the matter so well as you that I disdain all ears except yours. Or are you frightened of monsters?"

But then he let up for a moment, again, without explanation, and turned to the subject of Josie. He wanted her latest address; he appeared willing to let me off the hook. I could have gotten off completely, I suppose, if I'd just given him the damn thing. Why didn't I do it then? I could have just as well as not. As a matter of fact, she'd been living alone for some time then. Why couldn't I apply my "happiness" formula to Cornball? "Let them be happy." I may have thought it, I don't know, but I didn't write. I did nothing at all. I wanted him to fall through the earth.

Once again he wrote and tried to pass all his life in review. He came to the

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