"I can remember nothing of the story; or what seems to come I know is only confusion ... by things in it...." Vereker thought it might be well to change the current of his thoughts.
"Who were the Clemenceaux at Ontario?" said he.
"Of course, I ought to tell you that. Only there were so many things. Clemenceau was a jeweller at Ontario. I lived in the flat over his shop, and used to see a great deal of his family. I must have lived almost entirely among French Canadians while I was there—it was quite three or four years...."
"And all that time, Fenwick, you thought of yourself as a married man?"
"Married or divorced—yes. And long before that."
"It is quite impossible for me—you must see it—to form any picture in my mind of how the thing presents itself to you."
"Quite."
"It seems—to me—perfectly incredible that you should have no recollection at all of the marriage, or divorce, or whatever it was...."
"I did not say I had no recollection at all. Listen. Don't you know this, Vereker?—of course you do, though—how one wakes from a hideous dream and remembers exactly the feeling it produced, and how the same feeling comes back when one recalls from the dream some fragment preserved from all one has forgotten of it—something nowise horrible in itself, but from its associations in the dream?"