Page 490 - DRACULA

Dracula

This seemed to puzzle him, so I followed it up, ‘A nice
time you’ll have some time when you’re flying out here,
with the souls of thousands of flies and spiders and birds
and cats buzzing and twittering and moaning all around

you. You’ve got their lives, you know, and you must put
up with their souls!’
Something seemed to affect his imagination, for he put
his fingers to his ears and shut his eyes, screwing them up
tightly just as a small boy does when his face is being
soaped. There was something pathetic in it that touched
me. It also gave me a lesson, for it seemed that before me
was a child, only a child, though the features were worn,
and the stubble on the jaws was white. It was evident that
he was undergoing some process of mental disturbance,
and knowing how his past moods had interpreted things
seemingly foreign to himself, I thought I would enter into
his mind as well as I could and go with him
The first step was to restore confidence, so I asked him,
speaking pretty loud so that he would hear me through his
closed ears, ‘Would you like some sugar to get your flies
around again?’
He seemed to wake up all at once, and shook his head.
With a laugh he replied, ‘Not much! Flies are poor things,

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