Sir John struck a match, puffed his fresh cigar alight, deliberately examined the ignited end, and flung the match away. "Nothing happens. I told you it was just a scene, didn't I?"
"You said that somehow the dream was an unpleasant one."
"So I did. So it is. It makes me damnably uncomfortable every time I dream it; though for the life of me I can't tell you why."
"The picture as you draw it seems to me quite a pleasant one."
"So it is, again."
"And you say nothing happens?"
"Well—" Sir John took the cigar from his mouth and looked at it— "nothing ever happens in it, definitely: nothing at all. But always in the dream there's a smell of lemon verbena—it comes from the garden—and a curious hissing noise—and a sense of a black man's being somehow mixed up in it all.…"
"A black man?"
"Black or brown… in the dream I don't think I've ever actually seen him. The hissing sound—it's like the hiss of a snake, only ten times louder—may have come into the dream of late years. As to that I won't swear. But I'm dead certain there was always a black man mixed up in it, or what I may call a sense of one: and that, as you will say, is the most curious part of the whole business."
Sir John flipped away the ash of his cigar and leant forward impressively.