‘Why, going on like this, you’ll die, or go out of your mind, perhaps,’
I reasoned with myself, as I sat deep in thought at the window. ‘I must
give it all up. It’s dangerous. And now my heart beats so strangely. And
when I fly, I keep feeling as though some one were sucking at it, or as
it were drawing something out of it--as the spring sap is drawn out of
the birch-tree, if you stick an axe into it. I’m sorry, though. And Alice
too.... She is playing cat and mouse with me ... still she can hardly wish
me harm. I will give myself up to her for the last time--and then.... But
if she is drinking my blood? That’s awful. Besides, such rapid locomotion
cannot fail to be injurious; even in England, I’m told, on the railways,
it’s against the law to go more than one hundred miles an hour....’
So I reasoned with myself--but at ten o’clock in the evening, I was already
at my post before the old oak-tree.