Broadly speaking, he went backwards, not at a uniform rate, but in a series of irregular and unequal slips. That is to say, that though in six months or so of actual time he had retrograded the ten years between forty-five and thirty-five, it did not follow that he had gone back five years in three months or two and a half in any given six weeks. I went carefully into this point with him. I asked him, if the ratio was not a steady twenty to one (or a hundred and twenty months of experienced time as against six by the clock) what he estimated it at for shorter periods of either. But to this he could give no clear answer. Being unable to fix the precise turning-point, and hardly knowing when the indications in himself had begun (since at first he had put the whole thing aside as an absurdity), he had no datum. He had only become fully awake to the phenomenon when it had not been possible to disregard it any longer. "Well, as we've got to assume something let's assume that," I said. "When was it that you first had no doubt at all?" This he did more or less remember. I give his account in his own words. "It was about two months ago," he said. "I'd no book on hand. I don't mind admitting that I'd never felt so stale and empty and sick of everything I'd ever done. In fact I'd got to the point you noticed this afternoon." "What point was that? Don't let's take anything for granted." "When you rubbed me up about that first novel. I'd got to the point of hardly seeing any difference worth mentioning between the worst stuff and the best, Shakespeare included. Do you mind if I go into that rather in detail?" "Do."