Of course it was impossible for him to dress
well at this time, but he had even lost regard for decency and
cleanliness. He washed himself but rarely. He had even acquired the
habit of sleeping with all his clothes on during the colder nights of
the year.
Nothing made any difference. Gradually his mind grew more and more
clouded; he became stupid, sluggish. He went about the city from dawn to
dark, his feet dragging, his head hanging low and swinging from side to
side with the motion of his gait. He rarely spoke; his eyes took on a
dull, glazed appearance, filmy, like the eyes of a dead fish. At certain
intervals his mania came upon him, the strange hallucination of
something four-footed, the persistent fancy that the brute in him had
now grown so large, so insatiable, that it had taken everything, even to
his very self, his own identity--that he had literally _become the
brute_. The attack passed off and left him wondering, perplexed.
The Reno House, where Vandover had lived for some fifteen months, was a
sort of hotel on Sacramento Street below Kearney.
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