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comfort and security. His mind was in a tornado of perplexity, he was
himself inclined to agree with them, and he made a remarkably
ineffectual opposition to the proposal of his departure.
He went home flushed and heated, coat-collar crumpled, eyes smarting
and ears red. He watched each of the ten street lamps nervously as he
passed it. It was only when he found himself alone in his little
bed-room in Church Row that he was able to grapple seriously with his
memories of the occurrence, and ask, "What on earth happened?"
He had removed his coat and boots, and was sitting on the bed with his
hands in his pockets repeating the text of his defence for the
seventeenth time, "I didn't want the confounded thing to upset," when
it occurred to him that at the precise moment he had said the commanding
words he had inadvertently willed the thing he said, and that when he
had seen the lamp in the air he had felt that it depended on him to
maintain it there without being clear how this was to be done. He had
not a particularly complex mind, or he might have stuck for a time at
that "inadvertently willed," embracing, as it does, the abstrusest
problems of voluntary action; but as it was, the idea came to him with a
quite acceptable haziness. And from that, following, as I must admit, no
clear logical path, he came to the test of experiment.
He pointed resolutely to his candle and collected his mind, though he
felt he did a foolish thing. "Be raised up," he said. But in a second
that feeling vanished. The candle was raised, hung in the air one giddy
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