Not approval of any person, of any girl. Sally Gessler's approval, for instance, was less than nothing to him. He required the approval of the lovely, level, honest grey eyes which had come to comfort him, when he had been confined in the sanitarium, and which now stared at him in terror.
I thought how, on the terrace, he had denied to her what already he had done, trifling as those killings were in comparison to his plans. I thought how he had cried to her "they fell; fell; fell," of the army pilot and the mail flyer whom he had murdered. He had not told her, for he dared not.
Suddenly the reason for the effigy declared itself to me. Casting himself into crime, he would carry her with him but he could not carry herself; so he had, of himself, fashioned her effigy of wax and wood and seated it in the airplane which he dispatched on his murders. I thought of savages, who fashion clay figures of animals over which they wish to gain power, imagining that by enslaving the figure they may later control the creature itself; so he had enslaved her effigy. Unable
