“I only mean you were staring rather hard at nothing. It’s a pity to try and stare out of a beautiful blue day like this, don’t you think?”
“Stare beyond it, you mean?” asked Siegmund.
“Exactly!” replied the other, with a laugh of intelligence. “I call a day like this ‘the blue room’. It’s the least draughty apartment in all the confoundedly draughty House of Life.”
Siegmund looked at him very intently. This Hampson seemed to express something in his own soul.
“I mean,” the man explained, “that after all, the great mass of life that washes unidentified, and that we call death, creeps through the blue envelope of the day, and through our white tissue, and we can’t stop it, once we’ve begun to leak.”
“What do you mean by ‘leak’?” asked Siegmund.
“Goodness knows—I talk through my hat. But once you’ve got a bit tired of the house, you glue your nose to the windowpane, and stare for the dark—as you were doing.”
“But, to use your metaphor, I’m not tired of the House—if you mean Life,” said Siegmund.
“Praise God! I’ve met a poet who’s not afraid of having his pocket picked—or his soul, or his brain!” said the stranger, throwing his head back in a brilliant smile, his eyes dilated.
“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” said Siegmund, very quietly, with a strong fear and a fascination opposing each other in his heart.