He started up, gripping the arms of his chair, trembling.
“Yes, I’m going,” he said.
He rose, and went unevenly upstairs. Vera followed him close behind.
“If he reels and falls backwards he will kill me,” she thought, but he did not fall. From habit he went into the bathroom. While trying to brush his teeth he dropped the tooth-brush on to the floor.
“I’ll pick it up in the morning,” he said, continuing deliriously: “I must go to bed—I must go to bed—I am very tired.” He stumbled over the door-mat into his own room.
Vera was standing behind the unclosed door of her room. She heard the sneck of his lock. She heard the water still running in the bathroom, trickling with the mysterious sound of water at dead of night. Screwing up her courage, she went and turned off the tap. Then she stood again in her own room, to be near the companionable breathing of her sleeping sister, listening. Siegmund undressed quickly. His one thought was to get into bed.
“One must sleep,” he said as he dropped his clothes on the floor. He could not find the way to put on his sleeping-jacket, and that made him pant. Any little thing that roused or thwarted his mechanical action aggravated his sickness till his brain seemed to be bursting. He got things right at last, and was in bed.
Immediately he lapsed into a kind of unconsciousness. He would have called it sleep, but such it was not. All the time he could feel his brain working ceaselessly, like a machine running with unslackening
