Didn’t he know, Fred insisted to himself, in terror — at the moment when the skilled lecturer was dismissing him as a human polyp — that sound fellows, competent enough in their professions and their homes, when they were drafted into an army often appeared as clumsy plodders scorned by every boneheaded sergeant, or even as quivering, yelping cowards? Why shouldn’t a sanatorium be as black with magic as an army?

Fred half opened his magazine, closed it and went to tapping it again.

He drove out his nagging thoughts and began swiftly to scheme what he would do. Absorbed though he was in planning, he was sensitive to every smell, every sound, as he had never been since boyhood, when he had gone off to college in a grimy day coach and everything had been new and promising and terrifying and beautiful. His senses were heightened to ecstasy. (Dr. Janissary would probably have smirked and called him ‘hypomanic’.)

This was not a familiar Pullman chair car, such as he took forty times a year; it was a coloured jungle swaying in an earthquake. He smelled the plush of the seat, the metal and leather of his bag beside him, the gasoline-washed gloves of the woman across the way, the cellared grey air from the vestibule. He heard the steady bang of chains between the cars. He was conscious of the dustiness in his throat, and in imagination he tasted the thin, vintage coolness of a glass of ice water which had ripened till the ice had almost melted.

He was emotionally aware of fellow passengers whom normally he would never have seen. He hated the bushy-haired, vellum-faced man with a cord on his eyeglasses. (It was the celebrated lecturer.) He loved the powdery-cheeked old woman who sat so primly, soft old hands quietly folded. He was agitated by the sharp-nosed thin man far down the car . . . Could he be a shadow, sent by Sara to spy on him? Why did the man watch him so? Hell with him!

At a station stop he heard a radio, in a standing taxi, blatting ‘Coming Round the Mountain’, cloying as eggnog, and he wanted to weep. ‘Oh, stop it, you sentimental old hen!’ he jeered at himself, but that liquid oozing sweetness made him yearn over everything tender and banal: church bells on a June morning, babies laughing on a lawn, sunset over a lake, the cottage William Tyler Longwhale, and Hazel polishing glasses.

He was aware of the stream of life on which he was floating, and aware of himself as not being, any longer, merely Our Mr. Cornplow, Sr., a suit of clothes sitting at a desk, but a separate and exciting soul, a little different from any other. He rejoiced in his self, selfishness, self-consciousness. Why, he demanded, shouldn’t he be as gloriously self-conscious as any of the great souls of which he had read: Napoleon or St. Francis or Philip Sidney? Perhaps a part of their greatness had been an unwillingness to be cogs.