He affected to be almost asleep. So I repeated. He stared at me and then said:
"Oh! yes ... but you can have it for a bit if you like."
I sat down timorously on the extreme edge of the seat and stared at, but could not read, my newspaper out of sheer nervous apprehension. My sole idea was to get out as soon as I decorously could. Out of the corner of my eye, I observed the three children—two girls and a boy—all garbed in black clothes and wearing large clumsy boots with nails and scutes on the soles. The girls had large inflorescences of bushy hair which they swung about as they turned their heads and made me shudder. The mother's face was like a brown, shrivelled apple, topped with a black bonnet and festooned on each side with ringlets of curly dark hair. Around her neck a fur tippet: as I live—second-hand clothes dealers from Whitechapel.
The man I dare not look at: I sat beside him and merely imagined.
At ——, I got a decent seat and arrived at T—— jaded, but still alive, with no one to meet me. Decent rooms on the sea-front.
Next morning J—— went away for the week end and I could not possibly explain how ill I was: she might have stayed at home.
To preserve my sanity, Saturday afternoon, took a desperate remedy by hiring a motor-car and travelling to Torquay and back via Babbacombe....
On the Sunday, feeling suddenly ill, I sent for the local medico whom I received in the drab little room by lamplight after dinner. "I've a tingling in my right hand," I said, "that drives me nearly silly."
"And on the soles of your feet?" he asked at once.
I assented, and he ran thro' at once all the symptoms in series.