So much for June 8th, when, if he had had an age at all, it had presumably been thirty-five. Thereafter he had disappeared for exactly three weeks, and on June 29th, a Tuesday, he had spoken to me in the picture-house in Shaftesbury Avenue.
On the following day, Wednesday, June 30th, I had returned to Haslemere, having left Julia waiting for her books in the reading-room of the British Museum.
Then, two days later still, on Friday, July 2nd, they had unexpectedly turned up together at my house.
Now a definite note in the diary, written as a matter of fact in my own house (for he kept it instantly up to date), told me that on that day, July 2nd, he had "felt twenty-nine." True, he had later admitted the vagueness of these mere "feelings" as an index to age, but there it was for what it was worth, and it agreed with the impression I had myself formed, based on his vivid and ecstatic and momentary moods. Except when I had compelled him to speak of his book, Saturday had been the counterpart of Friday. That is to say, that during the whole of Friday and Saturday he had remained twenty-nine.
Therefore (and omitting the loss of the years forty-five to thirty-five, now untraceable), during the twenty-five days from June 8th to July 3rd he had dropped a total of six years.
So far so good; but that was not quite what I wanted to know. What I was trying to ascertain was a far more important thing—the shortest actual time in which he had lost the great length of apparent time. It would make the greatest practical difference in the world whether this figure were a high or a low one.
And now groan, as I groaned, when you look at the four days between June 29th and July 3rd—those four days in which, in order that he might be at the very top of his power for the writing of his book, he had vehemently denied his age, had juggled with it, wrestled with it, refused it, ignored it, vowed that a false middle was or should be a true one, and had hung as it were to a strap while the whole momentum of his being had tried to sway him in another direction.
The entry for those four days was a mere question-mark with an open choice. It read:
"Thirty-three—thirty?"