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"For a moment he gaped. Then he gave a sort of inarticulate cry,
dropped candle and writ together, and went blundering down the dark
passage to the stairs. I shut the door, locked it, and went to the
looking-glass. Then I understood his terror.... My face was
white--like white stone.
"
But it was all horrible. I had not expected the suffering. A night
of racking anguish, sickness and fainting. I set my teeth, though my
skin was presently afire, all my body afire; but I lay there like
grim death. I understood now how it was the cat had howled until I
chloroformed it. Lucky it was I lived alone and untended in my room.
There were times when I sobbed and groaned and talked. But I stuck
to it.... I became insensible and woke languid in the darkness.
"
The pain had passed. I thought I was killing myself and I did not
care. I shall never forget that dawn, and the strange horror of
seeing that my hands had become as clouded glass, and watching them
grow clearer and thinner as the day went by, until at last I could
see the sickly disorder of my room through them, though I closed my
transparent eyelids. My limbs became glassy, the bones and arteries
faded, vanished, and the little white nerves went last. I gritted
my teeth and stayed there to the end. At last only the dead tips of
the fingernails remained, pallid and white, and the brown stain of
some acid upon my fingers.
161
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