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busy stoking the body against cold air. This--like most events and experiences--is more a matter of mental climate than physical. Such attitudes are self-taught, people-taught, or environment-taught.

    One's frontal lobes are liable-unless trained in every particular at autocriticism--to hypnotize the rest of the brain into compliance with the ego's demand. Suggestion rises at some spot in the throbbing cerebral tissues, or from without, and is snatched up by the cortex to be delivered back as ultimate gospel to the whole human establishment: great balance of the brain and all the instincts in it, spinal cord, nerves, organs and muscles.
    These, then, like a converted Christian, are compelled by one fallible new layer of the organism to adjust to the command. When the whole man cannot, the cortex founders in neurosis or psychosis. Usually, however, the adjustment, farfetched or absurd though it may be, is sufficient so that the mechanism goes on with at least a semblance of effectiveness. Its nutty operator is allowed to live; people aren't very critical--or even observant.

    Only in human aggregates is the effectiveness shown to be mere semblance. Men seen locally in time and space appear purposeful enough, reasonable, even charitable.
    Seen whole, they are clearly insane. And only one in a thousand sees that this collective madness is but the sum of little acts of hypnosis performed by his own cortex on his whole man.

    Thus, in trifling example, where you might have been sweltering, I was sweating without psychic trauma. You may have taught yourself, been taught, or may have decided from observation that ninety degrees is an insufferable temperature. I have concluded it is pleasant. My constitution is no different from yours. The concept of thin blood is mythical--mine, indeed, is probably "thicker" than yours, for it contains a very high number of red cells. But the opinion my cortex holds of hot weather permits the rest of me to function in a hot room without the added burden of psychic pain. Your synthetic dread of hot weather may send you rushing to the seaside, where you then spend the day in a sun temperature of a hundred and twenty-five. You burn your skin. Or you exhaust yourself getting to the top of a mountain-where the unfamiliar and unseasonable coolness sets you sneezing with a cold.

    I have observed that millions of people who are obliged to live in temperatures of ninety seem to do so with tranquility and this is the message my cortex has delivered, not as gospel--not as the authority for a trance--but as submitted opinion. I have sent my brains the opposite message, in North Dakota, in the winter, with similarly good result.

    The latitudes of tolerance are immense. The uses people make of them are meager. They pant too much on hot days, shiver too much on cold. About God and science, sex and business, they have hypnotized themselves to the great benefit, they think, of that bright, running dot of conscious vanity called "I." Even asleep, they finally hear little but the repetition of their own opinion. It becomes the one voice on earth--
    God's, of course.

    The point here is--I liked the warm day.

    But liking is another poor, irrelevant expression. What did it matter, now, whether I liked, disliked, or snored with apathy?

    The elevator gnashed its teeth.

    I entered the green-walled room and took off all my clothes but my shorts. I unpacked the typewriter-paper box that held the pages of my serial. I set up a card table and put my portable machine on a comer of it. I gathered up cigarettes, an ashtray, Kleenex for my spectacles, pencils, and my pen.

    I had used the soft hair, high breasts and haunted eyes of--of what in hell was her name?--Yvonne Prentiss--as a barricade. Now, it dissipated. The sad look in her eyes was gone; her smile, like the Cheshire Cat's--that was gone. And the Ghoul came out from where it had been.

    I had expected it would.

    I said hello to the Ghoul.

    I knew the