itself was almost worse. He told in detail how, one day when he was making tea, he had held the lighted match not over the spirit-lamp, but over the open bottle of methylated spirit instead; so that not only himself, but the people in his own and the adjacent buildings, nearly, went up in flames. And he dwelt in particular detail, straining every resource he had at his command to make himself perfectly clear, upon a certain ghastly anomaly which he had of late observed in himself. It was this: that on certain days, i. e., under certain weather conditions, and in certain states of mind, he could not see an open window without having a horrible and inexplicable impulse to jump out. It was a mad and almost uncontrollable desire, a sort of desperate foolhardiness. The family were dining on Sunday in Fishers’ Lane, and he described how he had to summon all his powers, and crawl on hands and knees to the window to shut it. At this point everybody shrieked; his audience rebelled, and would listen no more.
He told these and similar things with a certain horrible satisfaction. But the thing about himself which he did not know, which he never studied and described, but which none the less grew worse and worse, was his singular lack of tact. He told in the family circle anecdotes of such a nature that the club was the only possible place for them. And even his sense of personal modesty seemed to be breaking down. He was on friendly terms with his sister-in-law, Gerda. But when he displayed to her the beautiful weave and texture of his English socks, he did not stop at that, but rolled up his wide, checkered trouser-leg to far above the knee: “Look,” he said, wrinkling his nose in distress: “Look how thin I’m getting. Isn’t it striking and unusual?” And there he sat, sadly gazing at his crooked, bony leg and the gaunt knee visible through his white woollen drawers.
His mercantile activity then, was a thing of the past. But such hours as he did not spend at the club he liked to fill in with one sort of occupation or another; and he would
265
