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The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
page 78 of 291 (26%)
anger--because he was afraid of fear.

Presently he found himself reasoning with himself. This imprisonment
was unaccountable, but no doubt the legal forms--new legal forms--of
the time permitted it. It must, of course, be legal. These people were
two hundred years further on in the march of civilisation than the
Victorian generation. It was not likely they would be less--humane. Yet
they had cleared their minds of formulae! Was humanity a formula as
well as chastity?

His imagination set to work to suggest things that might be done to him.
The attempts of his reason to dispose of these suggestions, though for
the most part logically valid, were quite unavailing. "Why should
anything be done to me?"

"If the worst comes to the worst," he found himself saying at last, "I
can give up what they want. But what do they want? And why don't they ask
me for it instead of cooping me up?"

He returned to his former preoccupation with the Council's possible
intentions. He began to reconsider the details of Howard's behaviour,
sinister glances, inexplicable hesitations. Then, for a time, his mind
circled about the idea of escaping from these rooms; but whither could he
escape into this vast, crowded world? He would be worse off than a Saxon
yeoman suddenly dropped into nineteenth century London. And besides, how
could anyone escape from these rooms?

"How can it benefit anyone if harm should happen to me?"

He thought of the tumult, the great social trouble of which he was so
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