Thoughts something in this manner ran through Aaron’s subconscious mind as he sat still in the strange house.  He could not have fired it all off at any listener, as these pages are fired off at any chance reader.  Nevertheless there it was, risen to half consciousness in him.  All his life he had hated knowing what he felt.  He had wilfully, if not consciously, kept a gulf between his passional soul and his open mind.  In his mind was pinned up a nice description of himself, and a description of Lottie, sort of authentic passports to be used in the conscious world.  These authentic passports, self-describing:  nose short, mouth normal, etc.; he had insisted that they should do all the duty of the man himself.  This ready-made and very banal idea of himself as a really quite nice individual:  eyes blue, nose short, mouth normal, chin normal; this he had insisted was really himself.  It was his conscious mask.

Now at last, after years of struggle, he seemed suddenly to have dropped his mask on the floor, and broken it.  His authentic self-describing passport, his complete and satisfactory idea of himself suddenly became a rag of paper, ridiculous.  What on earth did it matter if he was nice or not, if his chin was normal or abnormal.

His mask, his idea of himself dropped and was broken to bits.  There he sat now maskless and invisible.  That was how he strictly felt:  invisible and undefined, rather like Wells’ Invisible Man.  He had no longer a mask to present to people:  he was present and invisible:  they could not really think anything about him, because they could not really see him.  What did they see when they looked at him?  Lady Franks, for example.  He neither knew nor cared.  He only knew he was invisible to himself and everybody, and that all thinking about what he was like was only a silly game of Mrs. Mackenzie’s Dead.

So there.  The old Aaron Sisson was as if painfully transmuted, as the Invisible Man when he underwent his transmutations.  Now he was gone, and no longer to be seen.  His visibility lost for ever.

And then what?  Sitting there as an invisible presence, the preconceived world melted also and was gone.  Lady Franks, Sir William, all the guests, they talked and maneuvered with their visible personalities, manipulating the masks of themselves.  And underneath there was something invisible and dying—­something fading, wilting:  the essential plasm of themselves:  their invisible being.

Well now, and what next?  Having in some curious manner tumbled from the tree of modern knowledge, and cracked and rolled out from the shell of the preconceived idea of himself like some dark, night-lustrous chestnut from the green ostensibility of the burr, he lay as it were exposed but invisible on the floor, knowing, but making no conceptions:  knowing, but having no idea.  Now that he was finally unmasked and exposed, the accepted idea of himself cracked and rolled aside like a broken chestnut-burr, the mask split and shattered, he was at last quiet and free.  He had dreaded exposure:  and behold, we cannot be exposed, for we are invisible.  We cannot be exposed to the looks of others, for our very being is night-lustrous and unseeable.  Like the Invisible Man, we are only revealed through our clothes and our masks.