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 that long, dark face that had been foisted on him tricks
to do--lift an eyebrow, frown. There was scarcely any perceptible
pause between the wish and its performance. He found to his
discomfiture that the face answered instantaneously to the
slightest emotion, even to his fainter secondary thoughts; as if
these unfamiliar features were not entirely within control. He
could not, in fact, without the glass before him, tell precisely
what that face WAS expressing. He was still, it seemed, keenly
sane. That he would discover for certain when Sheila returned.
Terror, rage, horror had fallen back. If only he felt ill, or was
in pain: he would have rejoiced at it. He was simply caught in
some unheard-of snare--caught, how? when? where? by whom?