"We don't see the thing as it really is, I expect," he answered her, "nor people as they really are."
She moved restlessly.
"Now we're getting preachy. I expect you get preachy rather easily just as you used to. All I know is that I'm tired—tired to death. Do you remember how frightened I used to be twenty years ago? Well, I'm not frightened any longer. There's nothing left to be frightened of. Nothing could be worse than what I've had already. But I'm tired—damnably, damnably tired. And now I think I'll just turn over and go to sleep if you'll leave me for a bit."
He kissed her and left her, and at some moment between then and the morning she left him.
[CHAPTER VII]
THE RESCUE
At the very moment that Millie was knocking on Peter's door Henry was sitting, a large bump on his forehead, looking at a dirty piece of paper. Only yesterday he had fought Baxter in Piccadilly Circus; now Baxter and everything and every one about him was as far from his consciousness as Heaven was from 1920 London. The Real had departed—the coloured life of the imagination had taken its place. . . . The appeal for which all his life he had been waiting had come—it was contained in that same dirty piece of paper.
The piece of paper was of the blue-grey kind, torn in haste from a washing bill; the cheap envelope that had contained it lay at Henry's feet.