He thought rationally; that is to say, he thought clearly, as a child thinks clearly.

The primitive superstition of his Puritan forbears was his; and before this the buckler of his education disintegrated.

The idea of Ruth as a talisman against misfortune--which he now recognized as a sick man's idea--faded as his appreciation of the absurd reasserted itself.

But in its stead--toward morning--there appeared another idea which appealed to him as sublime, appealed to the primitive conscience, to his artistic sense of the drama, to the poet and the novelist in him.

He was and always would be dramatizing his emotions; perpetually he would be confounding his actual with his imaginary self.
To surrender himself to the law, to face trial and imprisonment, was out of the question.