"`I know there's a fellow called Smith,' he said in his rather
weird way, `living in one of the tall houses in this terrace.
I know he is really happy, and yet I can never catch him at it.'
"Sometimes he would, of a sudden, treat his wife with a kind of paralyzed
politeness, like a young stranger struck with love at first sight.
Sometimes he would extend this poetic fear to the very furniture;
would seem to apologize to the chair he sat on, and climb the staircase
as cautiously as a cragsman, to renew in himself the sense of their skeleton
of reality. Every stair is a ladder and every stool a leg, he said.
And at other times he would play the stranger exactly in the opposite sense,
and would enter by another way, so as to feel like a thief and a robber.
He would break and violate his own home, as he had done with me that night.
It was near morning before I could tear myself from this queer confidence
of the Man Who Would Not Die, and as I shook hands with him on the doorstep
the last load of fog was lifting, and rifts of daylight revealed the stairway
of irregular street levels that looked like the end of the world.
"It will be enough for many to say that I had passed a night with a maniac.
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