tself,
but for the torture of having to go to bed in it, had become quite
endurable. For now I no longer recognised it, and I became uneasy, as
though I were in a room in some hotel or furnished lodging, in a place
where I had just arrived, by train, for the first time.

Riding at a jerky trot, Golo, his mind filled with an infamous design,
issued from the little three-cornered forest which dyed dark-green the
slope of a convenient hill, and advanced by leaps and bounds towards the
castle of poor Genevieve de Brabant. This castle was cut off short by
a curved line which was in fact the circumference of one of the
transparent ovals in the slides which were pushed into position through
a slot in the lantern. It was only the wing of a castle, and in front
of it stretched a moor on which Genevieve stood, lost in contemplation,
wearing a blue girdle. The castle and the moor were yellow, but I could
tell their colour without waiting to see them, for before the slides
made their appearance the old-gold sonorous name of Brabant had given
me an unmistakable clue. Golo stopped for a moment and listened sadly to
the little speech read aloud by my great-aunt, which he seemed perfectly
to understand, for he modified his attitude with a docility not devoid
of a degree of majesty, so as to conform to the indications given in the
text; then he rode away at the same jerky trot. And nothing could arrest
his slow progress. If the lantern were moved I could still distinguish
Golo's horse advancing across the window-curtains, swelling out with
their curves and diving into their folds. The body of Golo himself,
being of the same supernatural substance as his steed's, overcame all
material obstacles--everything that seemed to bar his way--by taking
each as it might be a skeleton and embodying it in himself: the
door-handle, for instance, over which, adapting itself at once, would
float invincibly his red cloak or his pale face, never losing its
nobility or its melancholy, never shewing any sign of trouble at such a
transubstantiation.

And, indeed, I found plenty of charm in these bright projections, which
seemed to have come straight out of a Merovingian past, and to shed
around me the reflections of such ancient history. But I cannot express
the discomfort I felt at such an intrusion of mystery and beauty into
a room which I had succeeded in filling with my own personality until
I thought no more of the room than of myself. The anaesthetic