“It’s nothing to worry about, Nance—­it’s only funny.  I haven’t lost my mind or anything, you know—­spite of my tempered enthusiasm for your face—­but this is it:  first there came a fearful shock—­something terrible, that shattered me—­then it seemed as if that sickness found my brain like a school-boy’s slate with all his little problems worked out on it, and wickedly gave it a swipe each side with a big wet sponge.  And now I seem to have forgotten all I ever learned.  Clytie was in to feed me the inside of a baked potato before you came.  After I’d fought with her to eat the skin of it—­such a beautiful brown potato-skin, with delicious little white particles still sticking to the inside where it hadn’t all been dug out—­and after she had used her strength as no lady should, and got it away from me, it came to me all at once that she was my mother.  Then she assured me that she was not, and that seemed quite reasonable, too.  I told her I loved her enough for a mother, anyway—­and the poor thing giggled.”

“Still, you have your lucid moments.”

“Ah, still thinking about the face?  You mean I’m lucid when you smile, and daffy when you don’t.  But that’s a case of it—­your face—­”

“My face a case of what? You’re getting commercial—­even shoppy.  Really, if this continues, Mr. Linford, I shall be obliged—­”

“A case of it—­of this blankness of mine.  Instead of continuing my early prejudice, which I now recall was preposterously in your favour, I survey you coldly for the first time.  You know I’m afraid to look at print for fear I’ve forgotten how to read.”

“Nonsense!”

“No—­I tell you I feel exactly like one of those chaps from another planet, who are always reaching here in the H.G.  Wells’s stories—­a gentleman of fine attainments in his own planet, mind you—­bland, agreeable, scholarly—­with marked distinction of bearing, and a personal beauty rare even on a planet where the flaunting of one’s secretest bones is held to betoken the only beauty—­you understand that?—­Well, I come here, and everything is different—­ideals of beauty, people absurdly holding for flesh on their bones, for example—­numbers, language, institutions, everything.  Of course, it puzzles me a little, but see the value I ought to be to the world, having a mature mind, yet one as clean of preconceptions and prejudice as a new-born babe’s.”

“Oh, so that is why you could see that I’m not—­”

“Also, why I could see that you are—­that’s it, smile!  Nance, you are a dear, when you smile—­you make a man feel so strong and protecting.  But if you knew all the queer things I’ve thought in the last week about time and people and the world.  This morning I woke up mad because I’d been cheated out of the past.  Where is all the past, Nance?  There’s just as much past somewhere as there is future—­if one’s soul has no end, it had no beginning.  Why not worry about the past as we do about the future?  First thing I’m going to do—­start a Worry-About-the-Past Club, with dues and a president, and by-laws and things!”