So paralyzing to a man of Hampstead's sensitive nature was the effect of Marien Dounay's startling disclosure that he experienced a partial arrest of consciousness, the symptoms of which hung on surprisingly.
Somehow that night he got back to Oakland, and the next morning was again about his work; but the days went by mechanically—days of risings and retirings, eatings and sleepings, memorizing of lines, mumbling of speeches, sliding into clothes, slipping into grease paint, walkings on and walkings off. Through all of these daily obligations the man moved with a certain absent-minded precision, like a person with a split consciousness, who does not let his right lobe know what his left lobe is thinking.
He knew, for instance, that a telegram came to him one day with the charges collect, and that he paid the charges and signed for the message, but he did not know that the message lay unopened on his dresser while he spent all his unoccupied time sunk in a stupor of meditation upon the thing which had befallen him.
Most astonishing to John was the fact that while he felt rage and humiliation at having so duped himself over Marien Dounay, he had no sense of pain. He was like a man run over by a railroad train who experiences no throb of anguish but only a sickish, numbing sensation in his mangled limbs.
Recognizing that his condition was not normal, Hampstead wondered if he could be going insane. He was
