Vibrations of swiftly-increasing depth and wave-length were spreading through the air about him, filling the room from floor to ceiling.  What the syllables actually uttered may have been he was too dazed to realize, for no degree of concentration was possible to his mind at all; he only knew that, before his smarting eyes, with this rising of the voice to its old dominant inflexion, the figure of Mr. Philip Skale grew likewise, indescribably; swelled, rose, spread upwards and outwards, but with the parts ever passing slowly in consistent inter-relation, from minute to minute.  He became, always in perfect proportion, magnified and extended.  The growing form, moreover, kept pace exactly, and most beautifully, with the increasing tide of sonorous vibration that flooded himself, its utterer and the whole room.

Spinrobin, it seems, had just sufficient self-control left to realize that this sound was similar in quality to that which had first awakened him and caused the outlines of the furniture to alter, when the sight of Mr. Skale’s form changing thus terribly before his eyes, and within the touch of his very hand, became too much for him altogether....

What precisely happened he never knew.  The sounds first enveloped him, then drove him backwards with a sense of immense applied resistance.  He collapsed upon the sofa a few feet behind him, as though irresistibly pushed.  The power that impelled him charged vehemently through the little room till it seemed the walls must burst asunder to give it scope, while the sounds rose to such a volume that he figured himself drowned and overpowered by their mighty vibrations as by the storm swells of the Atlantic.  Before he lost them as sound he seems thus to have been aware of them as moving waves of air....  The next thing he took in was that amid the waste of silence that now followed his inability to hear, the figure of Philip Skale towered aloft towards the ceiling, till it seemed positively to occupy all the available space in the room about him.

Had he dropped upon the floor instead of upon the sofa it is probable that at this point Spinrobin would have lost consciousness, at any rate for a period; but that sofa, which luckily for his bones was so close behind, galvanized him sharply back into some measure of self-control again.  Being provided with powerful springs, it shot him up into the air, whence he relapsed with a series of smaller bounds into a normal sitting posture.  Still holding the lighted candle as best he could, the little secretary bounced upon that sofa like a tennis ball.  And the violent motion shook him into himself, as it were.  His tottering universe struggled back into shape once more.  He remembered vaguely that all this was somehow a test of his courage and fitness.  And this thought, strengthened by a law of his temperament which forced him to welcome the sweet, mad terror of the whole adventure, helped to call out the reserves of his failing courage.