Now let us take the queried figures separately and subtract.
If on the fourth day he had been the lower figure—thirty—then he had only dropped a year in a night.
But if on the fourth day he had been thirty-three, then he had dropped four whole years in the same time.
Either was possible, and yet in the one case the ratio was, appallingly, four times as great as in the other.
And now that I was getting to the root of the matter I wished to take nothing for granted. His equations were high above my head, but I reviewed the position in terms of my own. This is how I set it out:
| I HAD ALREADY KNOWN | THE DIARY NOW TOLD ME |
|---|---|
| That by June 8th he had slipped back from forty-five to thirty-five. | That his "straphanging" age three weeks later (on June 29th) was "thirty-three—thirty." |
| That on Wednesday, June 30th, Julia had been scheming to make herself his secretary. | In a pathetic little jotting of the same date, that he feared he would never write his book, that he was "getting too young for it," but that he intended to attempt it at all costs. |
| That on the following Friday and Saturday, at my house, he had been vivid, momentary, intense. | That he now doubted whether what he had at first thought to be will-power had really been that at all; in fact, that the real effort of will would have been, not to put his work out of his head for a couple of days, but to remember it. |
At this point I began to grow excited. It seemed to me that at last I began to see light. I had taken him step by step from the starting-point of June 8th to the evening of Saturday, July 3rd, and the reason I had not gone beyond that date was that the diary itself stopped there. Its last entry was the one I have just given—that he feared he had been mistaken in supposing that will-power had had anything whatever to do with that stolen week-end's holiday.
Oh, had there but been one, one single entry dated Sunday, July 4th!
For if it was possible for him to shuffle off four years in what I may call an ordinary night, what was impossible after an experience as stupefying as had been his on the night of Saturday-Sunday?
And yet in appearance it had not altered him. I had spent practically the whole of Sunday with him, and there had been nothing to indicate that he was not still twenty-nine. His manner, it is true, had been alternately jumpy and morose, but that might have been the mere vague pull of his Wanderjahre. Therefore it looked as if that mad onslaught of Julia's on his stability had passed him over after all.