"Both. I'm coming to the parcel in a minute. Well, as I was saying, I was just about fed up with things in general. Books in particular. Nice state of mind for an author with his living to earn to begin the week in! I remember stopping shaving to have a good hard look at myself. I remember saying to myself in the glass, 'You're young, you're a perfect miracle of youth; you've got quite a good brain as brains go; and yet instead of getting out of doors and living every minute of one of God's good days you'll sit down there, and make scratches on bits of paper that have got to be just like the scratches everybody else makes or you won't sell 'em; isn't there something wrong somewhere?' I asked myself that in the glass. And mind you, I was feeling extraordinarily fit physically. That's important. I'd felt like that for days past. Who wants to work when he feels like that?" I sighed a little. Even I, with my modicum of health, have occasionally felt too fit to work. "So I finished dressing and came in here to breakfast, and I was half-way through breakfast when that book caught my eye." "What book?" "The parcel I spoke of. It was a book. As a matter of fact it was Mrs Bassett's book, _The Parthian Arrow_." I glanced at him. "Registered?" "Yes. You mean one doesn't usually register a common or garden novel unless you want there to be no mistake about the person getting it?" "Go on." "So I opened it there and then and began to read it. I read it at a single sitting. Then I tore it in two. Wait a bit, I'll show you. Pass me a book, any one. They're all the same." I passed him a book from the untidy table, an ordinary two-inch-thick octavo volume in a cloth binding. Now read carefully. He didn't even change his position on the sofa. Using his knees only as a support, with his hands he tore the back into halves. Let me say it again. I don't mean he tore it lengthwise along the stitching. He didn't separate the pages into dozens or scores, nor bend or break it. He just tore it across as I might have torn a postcard. I can still see the creeping and fanning of the leaves under the dreadful pressure of his hands, the soft whity-grey fur of paper as the gap widened relentlessly before my eyes, hear the slightly harsher sound of the rending cloth and the little "zip" at the end. Then he tossed the two halves on to the table again. "I used to do a bit of that sort of thing years ago," he remarked, without even a quickening of his breath. "Half-crowns and packs of cards, you know. But I'd had to drop it. Your muscles have changed by the time you're forty-five. I'd tried to tear a pack of cards not long before, but I could only make a mess of them and had to give it up." I found not a word to say. As much as the feat itself the terrifying ease with which he had done it made me gape.