hundred things, once this was clear to me, but none of them
more than the wish to get up at once and leave the barn. If Shorthouse
was afraid already, what in the world was to happen to me in the long
hours that lay ahead? . . . I only know that, in my fierce efforts to deny
to myself the evidence of his partial collapse, the strength came that
enabled me to play my part properly, and I even found myself helping
him by means of animated remarks upon his stories, and by more or less
judicious questions. I also helped him by dismissing from my mind any
desire to enquire into the truth of his former experience; and it was
good I did so, for had he turned it loose on me, with those great powers
of convincing description that he had at his command, I verily believe
that I should never have crawled from that barn alive. So, at least, I
felt at the moment. It was the instinct of self-preservation, and it
brought sound judgment.

Here, then, at least, with different motives, reached, too, by opposite
ways, we were both agreed upon one thing, namely, that temporarily we
would forget. Fools we were, for a dominant emotion is not so easily
banished, and we were for ever recurring to it in a hundred ways direct
and indirect. A real fear cannot be so easily trifled with, and while we
toyed on the surface with thousands and thousands of words--mere
words--our sub-conscious activities were steadily gaining force, and
would before very long have to be properly acknowledged. We could not
get away from it. At last, when he had finished the recital of an
adventure which brought him near enough to a horrible death, I admitted
that in my uneventful life I had never yet been face to face with a
real fear. It slipped out inadvertently, and, of course, without
intention, but the tendency in him at the time was too strong to be
resisted. He saw the loophole, and made for it full tilt.

"It is the same with all the emotions," he said. "The experiences of
others never give a complete account. Until a man has deliberately
turned and faced for himself the fiends that chase him down the years,
he has no knowledge of what they really are, or of what they can do.
Imaginative authors may write, moralists may preach, and scholars may
criticise, but they are dealing all the time in a coinage of which they
know not the actual value. Their listener gets a sensation--but not the
true one. Until you have faced these emotions," he went on, with the
same race