her. I stared
about me quickly, nervously, trying to take in everything at once. Then
the purring sound grew much louder and closer, and I forgot my notion
that this woman was no stranger to me and that I knew her as well as I
knew myself. That purring thing was in the room close beside me.
Between us two, indeed, it was, for I now saw that her arm nearest to
me was raised, and that she was pointing to the wall in front of us.

Following the direction of her hand, I saw that the wall was
transparent, and that I could see through a portion of it into a small
square space beyond, as though I was looking through gauze instead of
bricks. This small inner space was lighted, and on stooping down I saw
that it was a sort of cupboard or cell-like cage let into the wall. The
thing that purred was there in the centre of it.

I looked closer. It was a being, apparently a _human_ being, crouched
down in its narrow cage, feeding. I saw the body stooping over a
quantity of coarse-looking, piled-up substance that was evidently food.
It was like a man huddled up. There it squatted, happy and contented,
with the minimum of air, light, and space, dully satisfied with its
prisoned cage behind the bars, utterly unconscious of the vast world
about it, grunting with pleasure, purring like a great cat, scornfully
ignorant of what might lie beyond. The cell, moreover, I saw was a
perfect masterpiece of mechanical contrivance and inventive
ingenuity--the very last word in comfort, safety and scientific skill.
I was in the act of trying to fit in my memory some of the details of
its construction and arrangement, when I made a chance noise, and at
once became too agitated to note carefully what I saw. For at the noise
the creature turned, and I saw that it _was_ a human being--a man. I
was aware of a face close against my own as it pressed forward, but a
face with embryonic features impossible to describe and utterly
loathsome, with eyes, ears, nose and skin, only just sufficiently alive
and developed to transfer the minimum of gross sensation to the brain.
The mouth, however, was large and thick-lipped, and the jaws were still
moving in the act of slow mastication.

I shrank back, shuddering with mingled pity and disgust, and at the
same moment the woman beside me called me softly _by my own name_. She
had moved forward a little so that she stood quite close to me, full in
the thin stream of moonlight that fell across the floor, and I was
co