“For the whole town, I suddenly realised, was something other than I so far saw it.  The real activities and interests of the people were elsewhere and otherwise than appeared.  Their true lives lay somewhere out of sight behind the scenes.  Their busy-ness was but the outward semblance that masked their actual purposes.  They bought and sold, and ate and drank, and walked about the streets, yet all the while the main stream of their existence lay somewhere beyond my ken, underground, in secret places.  In the shops and at the stalls they did not care whether I purchased their articles or not; at the inn, they were indifferent to my staying or going; their life lay remote from my own, springing from hidden, mysterious sources, coursing out of sight, unknown.  It was all a great elaborate pretence, assumed possibly for my benefit, or possibly for purposes of their own.  But the main current of their energies ran elsewhere.  I almost felt as an unwelcome foreign substance might be expected to feel when it has found its way into the human system and the whole body organises itself to eject it or to absorb it.  The town was doing this very thing to me.

“This bizarre notion presented itself forcibly to my mind as I walked home to the inn, and I began busily to wonder wherein the true life of this town could lie and what were the actual interests and activities of its hidden life.

“And, now that my eyes were partly opened, I noticed other things too that puzzled me, first of which, I think, was the extraordinary silence of the whole place.  Positively, the town was muffled.  Although the streets were paved with cobbles the people moved about silently, softly, with padded feet, like cats.  Nothing made noise.  All was hushed, subdued, muted.  The very voices were quiet, low-pitched like purring.  Nothing clamorous, vehement or emphatic seemed able to live in the drowsy atmosphere of soft dreaming that soothed this little hill-town into its sleep.  It was like the woman at the inn—­an outward repose screening intense inner activity and purpose.

“Yet there was no sign of lethargy or sluggishness anywhere about it.  The people were active and alert.  Only a magical and uncanny softness lay over them all like a spell.”

Vezin passed his hand across his eyes for a moment as though the memory had become very vivid.  His voice had run off into a whisper so that we heard the last part with difficulty.  He was telling a true thing obviously, yet something that he both liked and hated telling.

“I went back to the inn,” he continued presently in a louder voice, “and dined.  I felt a new strange world about me.  My old world of reality receded.  Here, whether I liked it or no, was something new and incomprehensible.  I regretted having left the train so impulsively.  An adventure was upon me, and I loathed adventures as foreign to my nature.  Moreover, this was the beginning apparently of an adventure somewhere deep within me, in a region I could not check or measure, and a feeling of alarm mingled itself with my wonder—­alarm for the stability of what I had for forty years recognised as my ‘personality.’