sat still in the strange house. He could not have fired it all
off at any listener, as these pages are fired off at any chance reader.
Nevertheless there it was, risen to half consciousness in him. All
his life he had _hated_ knowing what he felt. He had wilfully, if not
consciously, kept a gulf between his passional soul and his open
mind. In his mind was pinned up a nice description of himself, and a
description of Lottie, sort of authentic passports to be used in the
conscious world. These authentic passports, self-describing: nose short,
mouth normal, etc.; he had insisted that they should do all the duty
of the man himself. This ready-made and very banal idea of himself as a
really quite nice individual: eyes blue, nose short, mouth normal, chin
normal; this he had insisted was really himself. It was his conscious
mask.

Now at last, after years of struggle, he seemed suddenly to have dropped
his mask on the floor, and broken it. His authentic self-describing
passport, his complete and satisfactory idea of himself suddenly became
a rag of paper, ridiculous. What on earth did it matter if he was nice
or not, if his chin was normal or abnormal.

His mask, his idea of himself dropped and was broken to bits. There he
sat now maskless and invisible. That was how he strictly felt: invisible
and undefined, rather like Wells' _Invisible Man_. He had no longer a
mask to present to people: he was present and invisible: they _could_
not really think anything about him, because they could not really
see him. What did they see when they looked at him? Lady Franks, for
example. He neither knew nor cared. He only knew he was invisible to
himself and everybody, and that all thinking about what he was like was
only a silly game of Mrs. Mackenzie's Dead.

So there. The old Aaron Sisson was as if painfully transmuted, as the
Invisible Man when he underwent his transmutations. Now he was gone, and
no longer to be seen. His visibility lost for ever.

And then what? Sitting there as an invisible presence, the preconceived
world melted also and was gone. Lady Franks, Sir William, all the
guests, they talked and maneuvered with their visible personalities,
manipulating the masks of themselves. And underneath there was something
invisible and dying--something fading, wilting: the essential plasm of
themselves: their invisible being.

Well now, and what next? Having in some curious manner tumbled from the
tree of modern knowledge, and