He knew that, in a very short time, disturbance would begin.  He knew that doors would open and shut, that there would be movement, strange noises, then an attack upon himself, ultimately a removal of him to another place, a stripping off him of his blouse, his skirt, his socks and his shoes, a loathsome and strangely useless application of soap and water—­it was only, of course, in later years that he learned the names of those abominable articles—­and, finally, finally darkness.  All this he felt hovering very close at hand; one nod too many of his nurse’s head, and up she would start, off she would go, off he would go....  He watched her and stroked very softly his warm, fat calf.

It was a fine, spacious room that he inhabited.  The ceiling—­very, very far away—­was white and glimmering with shadowy spaces of gold flung by the sun across the breast of it.  The wallpaper was dark-red, and there were many coloured pictures of ships and dogs and snowy Christmases, and swans eating from the hands of beautiful little girls, and one garden with roses and peacocks and a tumbling fountain.  To Ernest Henry these were simply splashes of colour, and colour, moreover, scarcely so convincing as the bright blue screen by the fire, or the golden brown rug by the door; but he was dimly aware that, as the days passed, so did he find more and more to consider in the shapes and sizes between the deep black frames....  There might, after all, be something in it.

But it was not the pictures that he was now considering.

Before his nurse’s descent upon him he was determined that he would walk—­not crawl, but walk in his socks and shoes—­from his place by the window to the blue screen by the fire.  There had been days, and those not so long ago, when so hazardous an Odyssey had seemed the vainest of Blue Moon ambitions; it had once been the only rule of existence to sprawl and roll and sprawl again; but gradually some further force had stirred his limbs.  It was a finer thing to be upright; there was a finer view, a more lordly sense of possession could be summoned to one’s command.  That, then, once decided, upright one must be and upright, with many sudden and alarming collapses, Ernest Henry was.

He had marked out, from the first, the distance from the wall to the blue screen as a very decent distance.  There was, half-way, a large rocking-chair that would be either a danger or a deliverance, as Fate should have it.  Save for this, it was, right across the brown, rose-strewn carpet, naked country.  Truly a perilous business.  As he sat there and looked at it, his heart a little misgave him; in this strange, new world into which he had been so roughly hustled, amongst a horde of alarming and painful occurrences, he had discovered nothing so disconcerting as that sudden giving of the knees, that rising of the floor to meet you, the collapse, the pain, and above all the disgrace.  Moreover, let him fail now, and it meant, in short,—­banishment—­banishment and then darkness.  There were risks.  It was the most perilous thing that, in this new country, he had yet attempted, but attempt it he would....  He was as obstinate as his chin could make him.