"Why?" returned a _mouth_, suddenly materializing out of the design below both _eyes_, the second of which had resolved itself in time to wink at him in a most disconcerting manner, almost rudely, one might say. "Because," Mr. Harbinger faltered, at a loss as to how best to converse with a disembodied _mouth_ and a pair of floating _eyes_ which could not even remain on a line with each other, but kept drifting about over a small area of the wall, bumping together now and again. "In a moment you'll commit a non-sequitur like 'Oh yeah?' and I will scream," the _mouth_ promised. Mr. Harbinger, after a moment's pause in which he frantically tried to swallow those very words, somehow risen to his lips for the first time in his life, grasped at a straw. "Would a drink help make you go away?" he quavered. He was now beginning to feel that his mind was running down, and since he had never had a drink in his life, he possessed the abstainer's conception of alcohol as an instantaneous neural bombshell. "A drink for which one of us?" was the reply, and it sent him off in a whole new wilderness of speculation. "Which one of the three of you needs one?" he gulped, completely bemused. "Three of who?" the _mouth_ asked, in some consternation. Almost, Mr. Harbinger thought, in a trace of fright quickly concealed. "Oh, you mean those two _eyes_," it said laughing in obvious relief. "I'm sorry if their moving about that way upsets you, but I seem to have a bit of trouble with my control." The tone became somewhat rueful. "The mechanisms are not in very good condition these days." "Listen," exclaimed Mr. Harbinger, "If I am going to have hallucinations, I want, no, I insist that they be of an ordinary garden variety, not cluttered with such feeble self-excuses as machinery being at fault." He was quite wrought up, and to be so shook him visibly, for he was accustomed to a most unruffled, detached manner of thought. "The fault lies not with machinery, or, as I might like to tell myself, with this modern technical age running away too fast for us poor day-by-day mortals to keep up with it!" Mr. Harbinger took a deep breath, said, "That's not it at all. It's just that I have always had a romantic streak in me that is dying of malnutrition. I'm choked by the tedium, the huge, calibrated double-titrated BOREDOM of it all!" He sat down limply, breathless, for this was a major oration for Mr. Harbinger to deliver all at once. "Hell," said the _mouth_. "Me too." "What?" Mr. Harbinger faltered, becoming somewhat surer by the instant that such a remark was out of character for a deranged hallucination. It seemed to him, though he admittedly was ceasing to be a reliable judge of such matters, that the particular hallucination in question should be taking more the part of the strangling Don Juan in him, the drowning Errol Flynn, the departing Da Vinci.