THE DOOR IN THE WALL

I

One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told
me this story of the Door in the Wall. And at the time I thought
that so far as he was concerned it was a true story.

He told it me with such a direct simplicity of conviction that
I could not do otherwise than believe in him. But in the morning,
in my own flat, I woke to a different atmosphere, and as I lay in
bed and recalled the things he had told me, stripped of the glamour
of his earnest slow voice, denuded of the focussed shaded table
light, the shadowy atmosphere that wrapped about him and the
pleasant bright things, the dessert and glasses and napery of the
dinner we had shared, making them for the time a bright little
world quite cut off from every-day realities, I saw it all as
frankly incredible. "He was mystifying!" I said, and then: "How
well he did it!. . . . . It isn't quite the thing I should have
expected him, of all people, to do well."

Afterwards, as I sat up in bed and sipped my morning tea, I
found myself trying to account for the flavour of reality that
perplexed me in his impossible reminiscences, by supposing they did
in some way suggest, present, convey--I hardly know which word to
use--experiences it was otherwise impossible to tell.

Well, I don't resort to that explanation now. I have got over