that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so
fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish
fancy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?
So of course I said no more on that score, and we went to sleep before
long. He thought I was asleep first, but I wasn t, I lay there for
hours trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern
really did move together or separately.
On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a
defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind.
The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating
enough, but the pattern is torturing.
You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well under way in
following, it turns a back somersault and there you are. It slaps you
in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad
dream.
The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus.
If you can imagine a toadstool in joints, an interminable string of
toadstools, budding and sprouting in endless convolutions, why, that is
something like it.
That is, sometimes!
There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems
to notice but myself, and that is that it changes as the light changes.
When the sun shoots in through the east window I always watch for that
first long, straight ray it changes so quickly that I never can quite
believe it.
That is why I watch it always.
By moonlight the moon shines in all night when there is a moon I
wouldn t know it was the same paper.
At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and
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