cracked and rolled out from the shell of
the preconceived idea of himself like some dark, night-lustrous chestnut
from the green ostensibility of the burr, he lay as it were exposed but
invisible on the floor, knowing, but making no conceptions: knowing,
but having no idea. Now that he was finally unmasked and exposed,
the accepted idea of himself cracked and rolled aside like a broken
chestnut-burr, the mask split and shattered, he was at last quiet and
free. He had dreaded exposure: and behold, we cannot be exposed, for we
are invisible. We cannot be exposed to the looks of others, for our very
being is night-lustrous and unseeable. Like the Invisible Man, we are
only revealed through our clothes and our masks.

In his own powerful but subconscious fashion Aaron realized this. He was
a musician. And hence even his deepest _ideas_: were not word-ideas, his
very thoughts were not composed of words and ideal concepts. They
too, his thoughts and his ideas, were dark and invisible, as electric
vibrations are invisible no matter how many words they may purport. If
I, as a word-user, must translate his deep conscious vibrations into
finite words, that is my own business. I do but make a translation of
the man. He would speak in music. I speak with words.

The inaudible music of his conscious soul conveyed his meaning in him
quite as clearly as I convey it in words: probably much more clearly.
But in his own mode only: and it was in his own mode only he realised
what I must put into words. These words are my own affair. His mind was
music.

Don't grumble at me then, gentle reader, and swear at me that this
damned fellow wasn't half clever enough to think all these smart things,
and realise all these fine-drawn-out subtleties. You are quite right, he
wasn't, yet it all resolved itself in him as I say, and it is for you to
prove that it didn't.

In his now silent, maskless state of wordless comprehension, he knew
that he had never wanted to surrender himself utterly to Lottie: nor to
his mother: nor to anybody. The last extreme of self-abandon in love was
for him an act of false behaviour. His own nature inside him fated
him not to take this last false step, over the edge of the abyss of
selflessness. Even if he wanted to, he could not. He might struggle on
the edge of the precipice like an assassin struggling with his own soul,
but he could not conquer. For, according to all the current prejudice
and impulse in one directi