He strolled haphazard down the rue Soufflot, and the image of the unknown obsessed him, more irritating, more tenacious.
"I begin to understand the superstition of the succubus.

I must try some bromo-exorcism.

Tonight I will swallow a gram of bromide of potassium.
That will make my senses be good." But he realized that the trouble was not primarily physical, that really it was only the consequence of an extraordinary state of mind.

His love for that which departed from the formula, for that projection _out of the world_ which had recently cheered him in art, had deviated and sought expression in a woman.

She embodied his need to soar upward from the terrestrial humdrum.
"It is those precious unworldly studies, those cloister thoughts picturing ecclesiastical and demoniac scenes, which have prepared me for the present folly," he said to himself.