XXIII

In Drury Lane

“But you begin now to realise,” said the invisible man, “the full disadvantage of my condition. I had no shelter⁠—no covering⁠—to get clothing was to forego all my advantage, to make myself a strange and terrible thing. I was fasting; for to eat, to fill myself with unassimilated matter, would be to become grotesquely visible again.”

“I never thought of that,” said Kemp.

“Nor had I. And the snow had warned me of other dangers. I could not go abroad in snow⁠—it would settle on me and expose me. Rain, too, would make me a watery outline, a glistening surface of a man⁠—a bubble. And fog⁠—I should be like a fainter bubble in a fog, a surface, a greasy glimmer of humanity. Moreover, as I went abroad⁠—in the London air⁠—I gathered dirt about my ankles, floating smuts and dust upon my skin. I did not know how long it would be before I should become visible from that cause also. But I saw clearly it could not be for long.