Goliath shuffled to the couch. His huge black face stared over her closed eyes.
He remembered that he had thrown the girl against the wall and he paused. The street was black. Great shadows balanced themselves on his eyes.
"I have escaped from myself," he muttered.
He stood trying to remember himself. But his mind was like a night. Shapes tip-toed through its dark. A hooded figure loomed in his mind. It swung toward him as if it were flying out of his eyes. Other figures swept by. They assumed strange postures as they passed. His thoughts regarded them tiredly. He desired to join the figures fleeing out of him. Then he would vanish with them.
"I am too clever for that," he murmured aloud. "Yet it would be pleasing. To think in dark, hooded figures; ah--they have adventures! And I would sit like a night alive with witches."
"I no longer see or understand," he whispered. His hands felt his sides.
"Yet here I am. There is a life within me that I dare not enter. I must remember this. Write 'Forbidden' over its black doors. To succumb to my madness would be to lose it."
"She intruded," he remembered. "Perhaps I have killed her. That would be pleasant. Except that she was necessary as an image. I am the mirror and she is an image alive in me. Her desire is a happy shadow I embrace."
"Strange," he thought, "I see and yet what I look at remains invisible. But tonight outlines dance. The night is a maniac suffering from ennui. His dark eyes are weary with the emptiness they create. Vainly he searches for life, his eyes devouring it, and leaving only his own image for him to contemplate.
"I am not so mad as that. Or I, too, would sit like the night gorged with monotonous shadows. Instead, I translate. A memory of sanity gives diverting outline to the shadows in me. I am not a maniac like the night. My mind closes like a darkness over the world but I enjoy myself walking amid insane houses, staring at windows that look like drunken octagons, observing lamp posts that simper with evil, promenading fan shaped streets that scribble themselves like arithmetic over my face.
"These must be the things I look at. But they are my improvement. The world is not so outrageous if one is sufficiently mad to pull it into taffy shapes and incredible scrawls.