How intolerable not to be able to smoke, but people said that you came to appreciate it in time, and it was degrading to chew gum. Was it still alight? Again he burned his finger. He threw the cigarette away. Now it would be starting a fire; still he had thrown it out on the lawn. What was that? A tiny sound miles away, no one but a blind man could possibly have caught it. He sniffed, he could smell the fire, very small yet, but starting, just one flame, invisible in the sunlight, eating a pine-needle. What was to be done? To leave it was madness, but how to find it to put it out? Await developments, there was nothing probably. Stevenson’s last match. All the same the cigarette was not burning anything, it was an invention typical of the country. He was getting into the country state of mind already, with no sense of proportion, and always looking for trouble. And he would become more and more like that, when one was blind there was no escape. It was a wretched business. The life of the century was in the towns, he had meant to go there to write books, and now he was imprisoned in a rudimentary part of life. And the nurse was busy nursing him back to a state of health sufficient for him to be left to their all-enfolding embrace of fatuity. So that all he could do to keep his brain a little his own was to write short stories. Perhaps one on the nurse, with her love of white wards and of stiff flowers, they were sure to be stiff if she had any, and of a ghastly antiseptic sanity. With her love of pain and horrors, and of interesting cases, with her devastating knowledge of human anatomy. But that was rather cheap, for she wasn’t like that. She was merely dull, with a desire for something concrete and defined to hold on to. But she was dull.