you?'

The poor fellow pressed his hands to his forehead. 'I don't know,' he
said. 'I had some reason, I know.... I'll try to remember.'

'That's right. Try to remember everything. Eat a little more bread. What
did the reading-room look like?'

'Much as usual,' he at length muttered.

'Many people there?'

'Usual sort of number.'

'What did they look like?'

Soames tried to visualise them. 'They all,' he presently remembered,
'looked very like one another.'

My mind took a fearsome leap. 'All dressed in Jaeger?'

'Yes. I think so. Greyish-yellowish stuff.'

'A sort of uniform?' He nodded. 'With a number on it, perhaps?--a number
on a large disc of metal sewn on to the left sleeve? DKF 78,910--that
sort of thing?' It was even so. 'And all of them--men and women
alike--looking very well-cared-for? very Utopian? and smelling rather
strongly of carbolic? and all of them quite hairless?' I was right every
time. Soames was only not sure whether the men and women were hairless
or shorn. 'I hadn't time to look at them very closely,' he explained.

'No, of course not. But----'

'They stared at ME, I can tell you. I attracted a great deal of
attention.' At last he had done that! 'I think I rather scared them.
They moved away whenever I came near. They followed me about at a
distance, wherever I went. The men at the round desk in the middle
seemed to have a sort of panic whenever I went to make inquiries.'

'What did you do when you arrived?'

Well, he had gone straight to the catalogue, of course--to the S
volumes, and had stood long before SN--SOF, unable to take this volume
out of the shelf, because his heart was beating so.... At first,
he said, he wasn't disappointed--he only thought there was some new
arrangement. He went to the middle desk and asked where the catalogue of
TWENTIETH-century books was kept. He gathered that there was still only
one catalogue. Again he looked up his name, stared at the three little
pasted slips he had known so well. Then he went and sat down for a long
time....

'And then,' he droned, 'I looked up the "Dictionary of National
Biography" and some encyclopedias.... I went back to the middle desk
and asked what was the best modern book on late nineteenth-century
literature. They told me Mr. T. K. Nupton's book was considered the
best. I looked it up in the catalogue and filled in a form for it. It
was brought to me. My name wasn't in the index, but--Yes!' he said with
a sudden