t
the goods were genuine and of an excellent quality, and that as
regards the price their unspoken will was consulted. And in order to
carry on this occupation he went by train very early every morning
some few miles nearer to the City from the suburb in which he slept.
This was the use to which he put his life.

From the moment when he first perceived (not as one reads a thing in a
book, but as truths are revealed to one's instinct) the very
beastliness of his occupation, and of the house that he slept in, its
shape, make and pretensions, and even of the clothes that he wore; from
that moment he withdrew his dreams from it, his fancies, his
ambitions, everything in fact except that ponderable Mr. Shap that
dressed in a frock-coat, bought tickets and handled money and could in
turn be handled by the statistician. The priest's share in Mr. Shap,
the share of the poet, never caught the early train to the City at
all.

He used to take little flights of fancy at first, dwelt all day in his
dreamy way on fields and rivers lying in the sunlight where it strikes
the world more brilliantly further South. And then he began to imagine
butterflies there; after that, silken people and the temples they
built to their gods.

They noticed that he was silent, and even absent at times, but they
found no fault with his behaviour with customers, to whom he remained
as plausible as of old. So he dreamed for a year, and his fancy gained
strength as he dreamed. He still read halfpenny papers in the train,
still discussed the passing day's ephemeral topic, still voted at
elections, though he no longer did these things with the whole
Shap--his soul was no longer in them.

He had had a pleasant year, his imagination was all new to him still,
and it had often discovered beautiful things away where it went,
southeast at the edge of the twilight. And he had a matter-of-fact and
logical mind, so that he often said, "Why should I pay my twopence at
the electric theatre when I can see all sorts of things quite easily
without?" Whatever he did was logical before anything else, and those
that knew him always spoke of Shap as "a sound, sane, level-headed
man."

On far the most important day of his life he went as usual to town by
the early train to sell plausible articles to customers, while the
spiritual Shap roamed off to fanciful lands. As he walked from the
station, dreamy but wide awake, it suddenly struck him that the real
Shap was not the