"I mean I do not count myself as a man—only a sort of inexplicable waif, a kind of cancelled man. A man without a past is like a child, or an idiot from birth, suddenly endowed with faculties."
"What nonsense, Fenwick! You have brooded and speculated over your condition until you have become morbid. Do now, as Sally would say, chuck the metaphysics."
"Perhaps I was getting too sententious over it. I'm sorry, and please I won't do so any more."
"Don't then. And now you'll see what will happen. You will remember everything quite suddenly. It will all come back in a flash, and oh, how glad you will be! And think of the joy of your wife and children!"
"Yes, and suppose all the while I am hating them for dragging me away from you——"
"From me and Sally?"
"I wasn't going to say Sally, but I don't want to keep her out. You and Sally, if you like. All I know is, if their reappearance were to bring with it a pleasure I cannot imagine—because I cannot imagine them—it would cut across my life, as it is now, in a way that would drive me mad. Indeed it would. How could I say to myself—as I say now, as I dare to say to you, knowing what I am—that to be here with you now is the greatest happiness of which I am capable."
"All that would change if you recovered them."
"Yes—yes—maybe! But I shrink from it; I shrink from them! They are strangers—nonentities. You are—you are—oh, it's no use——" He stopped suddenly.