It was not that. But all the
time I was distressingly, and, I suppose, intuitively aware, though
in the darkness I couldn't even see his eyes, that there, behind
those eyes, inside that skull, was ambuscaded an alien personality
that spied upon me, measured me, studied me, and that said one thing
while it thought another thing.
When I said good night and went below it was with the feeling that I
had been talking with the one half of some sort of a dual creature.
The other half had not spoken. Yet I sensed it there, fluttering and
quick, behind the mask of words and flesh.
CHAPTER XI
But I could not sleep. I took more cream of tartar. It must be the
heat of the bed-clothes, I decided, that excited my hives. And yet,
whenever I ceased struggling for sleep, and lighted the lamp and
read, my skin irritation decreased. But as soon as I turned out the
lamp and closed my eyes I was troubled again. So hour after hour
passed, through which, between vain attempts to sleep, I managed to
wade through many pages of Rosny's Le Termite--a not very cheerful
proceeding, I must say, concerned as it is with the microscopic and
over-elaborate recital of Noel Servaise's tortured nerves, bodily
pains, and intellectual phantasma.
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