I made a gesture of despair. He went on repeating the word ‘sealed.’ I began to realise 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.’ ‘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 visualise them. ‘They all,’ he presently remembered, ‘looked very like one another.’ My mind took a fearsome leap. ‘All dressed in Jaeger?’ ‘Yes. I think so. Greyish-yellowish stuff.’ ‘A sort of uniform?’ He nodded. ‘With a number on it, perhaps?--a number on a large disc of metal sewn on to the left sleeve? DKF 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?’ Well, he had gone straight to the catalogue, of course--to the S volumes, and had stood long before SN--SOF, unable to take this volume out of the shelf, because his heart was beating so.... At first, he said, he wasn’t disappointed--he only thought there was some new arrangement. He went to the middle desk and asked where the catalogue of TWENTIETH-century books was kept. He gathered that there was still only one catalogue. Again he looked up his name, stared at the three little pasted slips he had known so well. Then he went and sat down for a long time....