"Oh?"
"You're thinking of the past three months generally, and the past three hours in particular."
"That doesn't carry me very far," I said.
He switched off the table lights and lay back in his chair with legs crossed.
"Don't you think it strange and—unsettling? Three months ago life was rounded and complete; you were all-sufficient to yourself. One day was just like another, till the morning when you woke up and felt lonely—lonely and wasted, gradually growing old. Till three, four hours ago you tried to define your new hunger.... Now you've forgotten it, now you're wondering why you can't drive out of your mind the vision of a girl you've not seen for twenty years. Shall I go on? You've just had a new thought; you were thinking I was impertinent, that I oughtn't to talk like this, that you ought to be angry.... Then you decided you couldn't be, because I was right." He paused, and then exclaimed quickly, "Now, now there's another new thought! You're not going to be angry, you know it's true, you're interested, you want to find out how I know it's true, but you want to seem sceptical so as to save your face." He hesitated a second time, and added quietly, "Now you've made up your mind, you're going to say nothing, you think that's non-committal, you're going to wait in the hope that I shall tell you how I know."
I made no answer, and he sat silent for a while, tracing his initials with the end of a match in the little mound of cigar ash on his plate.
"I can't tell you how I know," he said at last. "But it was true, wasn't it?"
"Suppose it was?"
His shoulders gave a slight shrug.
"Oh, I don't know. I just wanted to see if I was right."