atmosphere of decay and corruption which filled the place, back into the streets, but only to be dumb-founded again at the sight of a palace which surpassed in splendour any I had ever seen. And yet every stone, every gable, mullion, ornament, seemed strangely familiar; it was as if I had once built it all up in fancy for myself. I mounted the broad white marble steps, On the door-plate before me I read . . . my own name—Johann H. Obereit! I entered. Inside I saw myself clad in purple sitting at a table groaning with luxuries and waited on by thousands of fair women slaves. Immediately I recognized them as the women who had pleased my senses in life, though most of them but as a passing moment's whim.
"A feeling of indescribable hatred filled me when I realized that this foul double of mine had wallowed and revelled here in lust and luxury my whole life; that it was I myself who had called him into being and lavished riches on him by the outflow of the magic power of my own self, drained from me by the vain hopes and lusts and expectations of my soul.
"With terror I saw that my whole life had been spent in waiting and in waiting only—as it were an unstaunchable bleeding to death; that the time left me for feeling the present amounted to only a few hours.
"Like a bubble burst before me whatever I had hitherto thought to be the content of my life. I tell you that whatever we seem to finish on earth ever generates new waiting and hoping. The whole world is pervaded by the pestiferous breath of the decay of a scarcely-born present. Who has not felt the enervating weakness that seizes on one when sitting in the waiting-room of a doctor or lawyer or official? What we call life is the waiting-room of death!
