Herbert George Wells

The Door in the Wall, and Other Stories Herbert George Wells

One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me this story of theDoor in the Wall. And at the time I thought that so far as he was concerned it was a truestory. He told it me with such a direct simplicity of conviction that I could not do otherwisethan believe in him. But in the morning, in my own flat, I woke to a different atmosphere, and as I lay in bed and recalled the things he had told me, stripped of the glamour of hisearnest slow voice, denuded of the focussed shaded table light, the shadowy atmospherethat wrapped about him and the pleasant bright things, the dessert and glasses and naperyof the dinner we had shared, making them for the time a bright little world quite cut offfrom every-day realities, I saw it all as frankly incredible. "He was mystifying!" I said, andthen: "How well he did it!. . . . . It isn't quite the thing I should have expected him, of allpeople, to do well.