I Am Not Myself.

Limited edition (35 copies) printed by the Corvinus Press, 1939 (June).

A long tale, in five numbered sections, in which the narrator visits an old school friend at the rural home he shares with his father, aunt, and sister.

In the course of several meals, a cribbage evening, and outings in the snow, the father is revealed to be mentally traumatized by a mining disaster, and the daughter to be living a fantasy life incorporating two china dogs, an imaginary fox, and stories of foreign travel lifted from books.

Oddly attracted to each other, the narrator concludes that her eccentricities don't matter, but is then exposed to a more dramatic instance of her sickness. He departs, in shock and feeling "a little mad myself."

In The Atlantic Monthly (September 1939), The Flying Goat (1939), Thirty-One Selected Tales (1947), Selected Short Stories of H.E. Bates (1951), Selected Stories (1957), Love in a Wych Elm and Other Stories (2009).