At lengthening intervals he was measured, but now a little perfunctorily. Before long they would lose interest, and there would be no more visits. Whatever they had had in mind—entertainment, the pursuit of knowledge, the pleasure of being busied about something—they had intended him no harm, no good. It was impersonal, the traffic of water flowing over a stone. And one day, when they were finished with him, he felt a pat on his shoulder. It intended him no harm, no good—and it almost destroyed him. It was as if he were falling apart with happiness. For the first time, a fairy hand had rested on him with the wastefulness of a caress.

He froze, he burned; he was immortally awake, he was overwhelmingly sleepy; he experienced all the vicissitudes of love simultaneously. Even when he had dwindled down to his ordinary self, his mind had been jolted to a different tilt, and took a different retrospect. If he had offended them and so put himself in their power, they had shown a most moderate resentment, imposing nothing worse than solitude—which he had always preferred to company—and cobweb fetters. They had washed him, fed him, bedded him in a comfortable thickness of fern; their hands had always been gentle. Where was the farm animal who could say that of a mortal master? Why had he wasted all these months in being unappreciative?