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22
KEEBAN

Keeban, Steve, like the dual personality cases in the psychology books; or he must be a real, physical duplicate of me—Keeban; that's possible, too, of course. But the way I feel him usually is another way; and the one way he can't possibly be; he seems to be me going on and growing up and living my life, as it would have been, if I'd never come to you, Steve. So, that way, sometimes he seems more me than myself; for I seem to be somebody else and he, when I think of him that way, seems to be me."

We couldn't get any further than that; Jerry and I went to New York the next day and poked about the district where Davis claimed to have met Jerry, but we couldn't find trace of anybody like him. Jerry paid the hundred to Davis, I remember; he considered himself in some way responsible and soon the incident passed off as the fight had; Jerry lived it down and nothing like it occurred again for years, until this night when Jerry, at the Drake, talked to himself at the Sparlings and he went back to the Sparlings to learn that he had just that moment gone out with Dorothy Crewe.

If what Jerry had just told me was exactly true, there was—of course—no explanation of it but one; there existed, physically, another