Incredible as it will seem, this interval of time that I spent in space has no sort of proportion to any other interval of time in my life.  Sometimes it seemed as though I sat through immeasurable eternities like some god upon a lotus leaf, and again as though there was a momentary pause as I leapt from moon to earth.  In truth, it was altogether some weeks of earthly time.  But I had done with care and anxiety, hunger or fear, for that space.  I floated, thinking with a strange breadth and freedom of all that we had undergone, and of all my life and motives, and the secret issues of my being.  I seemed to myself to have grown greater and greater, to have lost all sense of movement; to be floating amidst the stars, and always the sense of earth’s littleness and the infinite littleness of my life upon it, was implicit in my thoughts.

I can’t profess to explain the things that happened in my mind.  No doubt they could all be traced directly or indirectly to the curious physical conditions under which I was living.  I set them down here just for what they are worth, and without any comment.  The most prominent quality of it was a pervading doubt of my own identity.  I became, if I may so express it, dissociate from Bedford; I looked down on Bedford as a trivial, incidental thing with which I chanced to be connected.  I saw Bedford in many relations—­as an ass or as a poor beast, where I had hitherto been inclined to regard him with a quiet pride as a very spirited or rather forcible person.  I saw him not only as an ass, but as the son of many generations of asses.  I reviewed his school-days and his early manhood, and his first encounter with love, very much as one might review the proceedings of an ant in the sand.  Something of that period of lucidity I regret still hangs about me, and I doubt if I shall ever recover the full-bodied self satisfaction of my early days.  But at the time the thing was not in the least painful, because I had that extraordinary persuasion that, as a matter of fact, I was no more Bedford than I was any one else, but only a mind floating in the still serenity of space.  Why should I be disturbed about this Bedford’s shortcomings?  I was not responsible for him or them.

For a time I struggled against this really very grotesque delusion.  I tried to summon the memory of vivid moments, of tender or intense emotions to my assistance; I felt that if I could recall one genuine twinge of feeling the growing severance would be stopped.  But I could not do it.  I saw Bedford rushing down Chancery Lane, hat on the back of his head, coat tails flying out, en route for his public examination.  I saw him dodging and bumping against, and even saluting, other similar little creatures in that swarming gutter of people.  Me?  I saw Bedford that same evening in the sitting-room of a certain lady, and his hat was on the table beside him, and it wanted brushing badly, and he was in tears.  Me?  I saw him with that lady in various attitudes and emotions—­I never felt so detached before....  I saw him hurrying off to Lympne to write a play, and accosting Cavor, and in his shirt sleeves working at the sphere, and walking out to Canterbury because he was afraid to come!  Me?  I did not believe it.