If I tried to be gracious, I could never keep it up, because I always forget that I am visible. She called in her eyes, which must have been staring all the time blankly about the table, so many impressions had she gathered of the various groups, animated now in their unconscious relief at the approaching end of the long sitting. Here again was one of those moments of being conscious of the strange fact of her incurable illusion, and realising its effects in the past and the effects it must always have if she did not get away from it. Nearly always she must appear both imbecile and rude, staring, probably with her mouth half open, lost. Well-brought-up children were _trained_ out of it. No one had dared to try and train her for long. They had been frightened, or offended, by her scorn of their brisk cheerful pose of polite interest in the _surface_ of everything that was said. It was not worth doing. Polite society was not worth having. Every time one tried for awhile, holding oneself in, thinking of oneself sitting there as others were sitting, consciousness came to an end. It meant having opinions. Taking sides. It presently narrowed life down to a restive discomfort...... Jan went about the streets thinking she was invisible ... “and then quite suddenly I saw myself in a shop mirror. _My dear._ I got straight into an omnibus and went home. I could not stand the sight of my hips.” But with people, in a room, she never forgot she was there. The sight of Mr. Shatov waiting for her under the gas in the drawing-room gathered all her thoughts together, struggling for simultaneous expression. She came slowly across the room, with eyes downcast to avoid the dimly-lit corner where he stood, and sought rapidly amongst the competing threads of thought for some fragment that could be shaped into speech before he should make the communication she had seen waiting in his face. The sympathetic form must listen and make some understanding response. She felt herself stiffening in angry refusal to face the banishment of her tangled mass of thought by some calmly oblivious statement, beginning nowhere and leading them on into baseless discussion, impeded on her part by the pain of unstated vanishing things. They began speaking together and he halted before her formal harsh-voiced words. “There is always a bad light on Saturday evenings because nearly every one goes out” she said and looked her demand for his recognition of the undischarged burden of her mind impatiently about the room.