Again and again I filled his glass, and always, mechanically, he emptied it; but the wine kindled no spark of enterprise in him. He did not eat, and I myself ate hardly at all. I did not in my heart believe that any dash for freedom could save him. The chase would be swift, the capture certain. But better anything than this passive, meek, miserable waiting. I told Soames that for the honor of the human race he ought to make some show of resistance. He asked what the human race had ever done for him. "Besides," he said, "can't you understand that I'm in his power? You saw him touch me, didn't you? There's an end of it. I've no will. I'm sealed." I made a gesture of despair. He went on repeating the word "sealed." I began to realize that the wine had clouded his brain. No wonder! Foodless he had gone into futurity, foodless he still was. I urged him to eat, at any rate, some bread. It was maddening to think that he, who had so much to tell, might tell nothing. "How was it all," I asked, "yonder? Come, tell me your adventures!" "They'd make first-rate 'copy,' wouldn't they?" "I'm awfully sorry for you, Soames, and I make all possible allowances; but what earthly right have you to insinuate that I should make 'copy,' as you call it, out of you?" The poor fellow pressed his hands to his forehead. "I don't know," he said. "I had some reason, I know. I'll try to remember. He sat plunged in thought. "That's right. Try to remember everything. Eat a little more bread. What did the reading-room look like?" "Much as usual," he at length muttered. "Many people there?" "Usual sort of number." "What did they look like?" Soames tried to visualize them. "They all," he presently remembered, "looked very like one another." My mind took a fearsome leap. "All dressed in sanitary woolen?" "Yes, I think so. Grayish-yellowish stuff." "A sort of uniform?" He nodded. "With a number on it perhaps--a number on a large disk of metal strapped round the left arm? D. K. F. 78,910--that sort of thing?" It was even so. "And all of them, men and women alike, looking very well cared for? Very Utopian, and smelling rather strongly of carbolic, and all of them quite hairless?" I was right every time. Soames was only not sure whether the men and women were hairless or shorn. "I hadn't time to look at them very closely," he explained. "No, of course not. But--" "They stared at ME, I can tell you. I attracted a great deal of attention." At last he had done that! "I think I rather scared them. They moved away whenever I came near. They followed me about, at a distance, wherever I went. The men at the round desk in the middle seemed to have a sort of panic whenever I went to make inquiries." "What did you do when you arrived?"