"My!" Mr. Harbinger mumbled weakly, sinking like a wilting leaf into his patently uneasy easy chair. "I'm afraid the complications of this thing, be it lunacy or be it occult or whatever, are getting completely beyond me."
He sat there trembling and impotent, unable to do much of anything beyond refusing to observe the two bizarrely supported cups of steaming tea.
At last the mouth said in some reproach, "If you will be good enough to take one of these off my hands.... Oh, I say ... off my hands!... I'd very much like to have a bit of the other."
The left hand seemed to extend itself toward Mr. Harbinger a bit, and though he could not help but cower down in his chair, unhinged as he was by all this, he at last realized that it would be only common courtesy to do what the mouth had asked.
So realizing, he forced, literally forced, his trembling hand to take the cup from the proferring impossibility, and retract slowly enough to avoid catapulting the chattering china across the room. As it was there was a good deal of splashing before he managed to get it safe on the small table by the side of the chair.
The mouth made a creditable job of the tea-sipping, considering the handicaps it was forced to operate under; the wandering eyes and all. And at length, after performing a most peculiar contortion in obvious reluctance to further prostrate its host by asking for a napkin, it voiced a thought which caught Mr. Harbinger's attention in spite of his badly shattered composure.
"Doesn't it seem," it said musingly, almost to itself, "as though there ought to be some way we, that is to say you and I as we exist in our own Time, could right the wrongs of our respective situations."
It wasn't a question—more of a spoken dream thought, with all the drifting oddness of inflection that those occasionally voiced wisps of desire usually possess.
The very familiarity of that unmistakable kind of shading, its very humanness convinced, in a second, Mr. Harbinger of the reality of the thing which was occurring in his room, as all the fantastic things which had gone before had failed to do more than terrify him beyond enduring. He became, in that instant, a believer.
Accordingly he said the, to him, proper thing.