ELLEN TERHUNE
515
think interesting at the time when there was more going on; and one
broods on other peaple much more.
I brooded a good deal on Ellen. I sent flowers and a note to the
hospital, but I never had any reply. Her phone was still out of order, and
I thought I ought to call at the house and find out how she was doing;
but for days I was restrained by some instinct.ive reluctance which would
take me into town or to some other neighbor's house when I had set out
with the intention of going there.
This reluctance was due to an unpleasant reaction which I had had
after my last two visits. One of the symptoms of certain neurotic states
is the irrational drop of morale, the depression that may suddenly descend
on us and absolutely flatten us out, from some stimulus that seems irrele·
vant or triffing-a passing sarcasm in conversation directed at someone
else, a child ducking a cat in the gutter, a memory drifting into the head
of something clumsy one did in one's childhood. I had had a touch of
this at one time, and I found that my visits to Ellen's renewed it. This was
only, I told myself, vicarious: I was merely being affected accidentally
by things that in reality were experienced by others; but it was enough
to give me disagreeable sinkings, living as I then did alone, in the evening
or even the next afternoon after I had been to Vallombrosa. It was a
revival of my old morbidity; but it took a peculiar turn. I would feel
suddenly after lunch or dinner that living in the country was hopeless,
that I had no communication with other people, and that nothing I was
doing meant anything; yet on the other hand I could not see any hope
in living in the city or traveling: I knew what human beings were-they
might be more or less picturesque in their various environments and
climates, and to the young this was ·a source of excitement; but to me, in
my middle thirties, it was desolatingly, incontrovertibly evident that
people under any conditions were the same pathetic freaks, and why should
I go to the trouble of moving about among them in order to observe
the shapes which their defects and distortions could take?
I had had something like this feeling before, though the emphasis
on deformity, I believed, was new: but in the past it had led to an impulse
which was vaguely and remotely suicidal. Now the impulse was directed
toward an act that would be absolutely immediate and definite: to go back
to Ellen's house. This seemed a good deal less serious than suicide; yet
there was something about it that scared me. For one thing, it presented
itself to me as a compulsion imposed from outside myself as to which
I had not even the option of yielding on my own terms; and, for another,
I felt that in revisiting that house, I was getting into something very
queer which I didn't know how to handle. I did my best to. resist this
compulsion, and I did not allow myself to go till the impulse was no
longer felt as morbid and I could put
it
to myself that I was merely
dropping in to inquire about the illness of a friend. Nevertheless, I went:
I could only choose one way.
I did, however, semi-consciously, make a point of going early in the
