Really, I had been, and was, very sick.

Mad thoughts of isolating myself entirely from the world had hounded me.

I had even canvassed the idea of going to Molokai and devoting the rest of my years to the lepers--I, who was thirty years old, and healthy and strong, who had no particular tragedy, who had a bigger income than I knew how to spend, who by my own achievement had put my name on the lips of men and proved myself a power to be reckoned with--I was that mad that I had considered the lazar house for a destiny.
Perhaps it will be suggested that success had turned my head.

Very well.
Granted.

But the turned head remains a fact, an incontrovertible fact--my sickness, if you will, and a real sickness, and a fact.