I saw his expression then, and I stopped, furious with myself. Why
had I said it? But more important still, why did I feel it? I had
not put it into words before, I had not expected to say it then.
But the moment I said it I knew it was true. I had developed an
idee fixe.

"I have to go downstairs at night and answer it," I added, rather
feebly. "It's on my nerves, I think."

"I should think it is," he said, with a note of wonder in his voice.
"It doesn't sound like you. A telephone!" But just at the church
door he stopped me, a hand on my arm.

"Look here," he said, "don't you suppose it's because you're so
dependent on the telephone? You know that if anything goes wrong
with it, you're cut off, in a way. And there's another point--you
get all your news over it, good and bad." He had difficulty, I
think, in finding the words he wanted. "It's--it's vital," he
said. "So you attach too much importance to it, and it gets to be
an obsession."

"Very likely," I assented. "The whole thing is idiotic, anyhow."

But--was it idiotic?

I am endeavoring to set things down as they seemed to me at the time,
not in the light of subsequent events. For, if this narrative has
any interest at all, it is a psychological one. I have said that
it is a study in fear, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say
that it is a study of the mental reaction of crime, of its effects