They noticed that he was silent, and even absent at times, but they
found no fault with his behaviour with customers, to whom he remained
as plausible as of old. So he dreamed for a year, and his fancy gained
strength as he dreamed. He still read halfpenny papers in the train,
still discussed the passing day's ephemeral topic, still voted at
elections, though he no longer did these things with the whole
Shap--his soul was no longer in them.

He had had a pleasant year, his imagination was all new to him still,
and it had often discovered beautiful things away where it went,
southeast at the edge of the twilight. And he had a matter-of-fact and
logical mind, so that he often said, "Why should I pay my twopence at
the electric theatre when I can see all sorts of things quite easily
without?" Whatever he did was logical before anything else, and those
that knew him always spoke of Shap as "a sound, sane, level-headed
man."

On far the most important day of his life he went as usual to town by
the early train to sell plausible articles to customers, while the
spiritual Shap roamed off to fanciful lands. As he walked from the
station, dreamy but wide awake, it suddenly struck him that the real
Shap was not the one walking to Business in black and ugly clothes,
but he who roamed along a jungle's edge near the ramparts of an old
and Eastern city that rose up sheer from the sand, and against which
the desert lapped with one eternal wave. He used to fancy the name of
that city was Larkar. "After all, the fancy is as real as the body,"
he said with perfect logic. It was a dangerous theory.

For that other life that he led he realized, as in Business, the