The faintest hint of vexation was in the answer. 

 ‘What is the matter? Can’t I help? It’s so very absurd—’ 

 ‘What is absurd?’ he asked dully. 

 ‘Why, standing like this outside my own bedroom door. Are you ill? I will send for Dr. Simon.’ 

 ‘Please, Sheila, do nothing of the kind. I am not ill. I merely want a little time to think in.’ There was again a brief pause, and then a slight rattling at the handle. 

 ‘Arthur, I insist on knowing at once what’s wrong; this does not sound a bit like yourself. It is not even quite like your own voice.’ 

 ‘It is myself,’ he replied stubbornly, staring fixedly into the glass. You must give me a few moments, Sheila. Something has happened. My face. Come back in an hour.’ 

 ‘Don’t be absurd; it’s simply wicked to talk like that. How do I know what you are doing? As if I can leave you for an hour in uncertainty! Your face! If you don’t open at once I shall believe there’s something seriously wrong: I shall send Ada for assistance.’ 

 ‘If you do that, Sheila, it will be disastrous. I cannot answer for the con—. Go quietly downstairs. Say I am unwell; don’t wait dinner for me; come back in an hour; oh, half an hour!’ 

 The answer broke out angrily. ‘You must be mad, beside yourself, to ask such a thing. I shall wait in the next room until you call.’ 

 ‘Wait where you please,’ Lawford replied, ‘but tell them downstairs.’ 

 ‘Then if I tell them to wait until half-past eight, you will come down? You say you are not ill: the dinner will be ruined. It’s absurd.’ 

 Lawford made no answer. He listened a while, then he deliberately sat down once more to try to think. Like a squirrel in a cage his mind seemed to be aimlessly, unceasingly astir. ‘What is it really? What is it really?—really?’ He sat there and it seemed to him his body was transparent as glass. It seemed he had no body at all—only the memory of an hallucinatory reflection in the glass, and this inward voice crying, arguing, questioning, threatening out of the silence—‘What is it really—really—really?’ And at last, cold, wearied out, he rose once more and leaned between the two long candle-flames, and stared on—on—on, into the glass. 

 He gave 

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