s
into his. And naturally, of course to make his entrance too. If like
a tenuous smoke he can get in, the probability is that he gets out
in precisely the same fashion. For really, if you weren't consciously
expecting the customary impact (you actually jerk forward in the act of
resistance unresisted), you would not notice his going. I am afraid I
must be horribly boring you with all these tangled theories. All I mean
is, that if you were really absorbed in what you happened to be doing at
the time, the thing might come and go, with your mind for entrance and
exit, as it were, without your being conscious of it at all.' There was
a longish pause, in which Herbert slowly inhaled and softly breathed out
his smoke.

'And what--what is the poor wretch searching FOR? And what--why, what
becomes of him when he does go?'

'Ah, there you have me! One merely surmises just as one's temperament or
convictions lean. Grisel says it's some poor derelict soul in search of
peace--that the poor beggar wants finally to die, in fact, and can't.
Sallie smells crime. After all, what is every man?' he talked on; 'a
horde of ghosts--like a Chinese nest of boxes--oaks that were acorns
that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front--in our ancestors,
back and back, until--'

'"Until?"' Lawford managed to remark.

'Ah, that settles me again. Don't they call it an amoeba? But really I
am abjectly ignorant of all that kind of stuff. We are ALL we are, and
all in a sense we care to dream we are. And for that matter, anything
outlandish, bizarre, is a godsend in this rather stodgy life. It is
after all just what the old boy said--it's only the impossible that's
credible; whatever credible may mean....'

It seemed to Lawford as if the last remark had wafted him bodily into
the presence of his kind, blinking, intensely anxious old friend, Mr
Bethany. And what leagues asunder the two men were who had happened on
much the same words to express their convictions.

He drew his hand gropingly over his face, half rose, and again seated
himself. 'Whatever it may be,' he said, 'the whole thing reminds me, you
know--it is in a way so curiously like my own--my own case.'

Herbert sat on, a little drawn up in his chair, quietly smoking. The
crash of the falling water, after seeming to increase in volume with
the fading of evening, had again died down in the darkness to a low
multitudinous tumult as of countless inarticulate, echoing voices.

'"Biza