THEY GO HOME 6oi

was very short-sighted, almost helpless, without his
glasses, and after he had stumbled upstairs to their bed-
room, he spent some time groping about for the old pair.
Annoyed by the dim shapelessness of everything, he told
himself that he ought to have been wearing his glasses
before he started on such a search, Then he saw the
irony of it, and was quite entertained for a few moments,
during which he felt for the first time for a long while
a curiously reassuring detachment from things, and
when he found the old glasses and put them on, he
seemed, for one brief interval, to be staring at another
and smaller world, and it was a world that could play
all manner of tricks with Herbert Norman Smeeth, but
could never capture, swallow, and digest the whole of
him, The newly-born ironist then returned downstairs,
to eat his supper,