He told it me with such a direct simplicity of conviction that I could not do otherwise than believe in him. But in the morning, in my own flat, I woke to a different atmosphere; and as I lay in bed and recalled the things he had told me, stripped of the glamour of his earnest slow voice, denuded of the focused, shaded table light, the shadowy atmosphere that wrapped about him and me, and the pleasant bright things, the dessert and glasses and napery of the dinner we had shared, making them for a time a bright little world quite cut off from everyday realities, I saw it all as frankly incredible. ‘He was mystifying!’ I said, and then: ‘How well he did it! … It isn’t quite the thing I should have expected him, of all people, to do well.’
Afterwards as I sat up in bed and sipped my morning tea, I found myself trying to account for the flavor of reality that perplexed me in this impossible reminiscences, convey – I hardly know which word to use – experiences it was otherwise impossible to tell.
H.G. Wells The Door in the Wall Penguin 2010
