“Hot,” said Jones.
“Hot,” said the attendant.
“Hot,” said the unseen person in the bath-room, as if registering the order in his mind. Then came the fizzling of water and in a couple of minutes the voice:
“Gentleman’s bath ready.”
Jones bathed, and though the door of the bath-room had been shut upon him and there was no person present, he felt all the time that someone was watching him. When he was fully dressed, the attendant opened the other door, and ushered him into the sitting-room, where breakfast was laid on a small table by the window. He had the choice between eggs and bacon and sausages, he chose the former and whilst waiting, attracted by the pleasant summery sound of croquet balls knocking together, he looked out of the window.
Two gentlemen in white flannels were playing croquet; stout elderly gentlemen they were. And on a garden seat a young man in flannel trousers and a grey tweed coat was seated watching the game and smoking cigarettes.
He guessed these people to be fellow prisoners. They looked happy enough, and having noticed this fact he sat down to breakfast.
He noted that the knife accompanying his fork was blunt and of very poor quality—of the sort warranted not to cut throats, but he did not heed much. He had other things to think of. The men in flannels had given him a shock. Instinctively he knew them to be “inmates.” He had never considered the question of lunatics and lunatic asylums before. Vague recollections of Edgar Allan Poe and the works of Charles Reade had surrounded the term lunatic asylum with an atmosphere of feather beds and brutality; the word lunatic conjured up in his mind the idea of a man obviously insane. The fact that this place was a house quite ordinary and pleasant in appearance, and these sane looking gentlemen lunatics, gave him a grue.
The fact that an apparently sane individual can be held as a prisoner was beginning to steal upon him, that a man might be able to play croquet and laugh and talk and take an intelligent interest in life and yet, just because of some illusion, be held as a prisoner.
He did not fully realise this yet, but it was dawning upon him. But he did fully realise that he had lost his liberty.