It seemed to him as if he were reading his fate on the polished surface of this object, a fate laborious, complicated, burdened, but at the same time rolled and tossed about at random by many alien hands! Was there any portion of his identity, compact, self-contained, weighted with inward intention, like the “bias” of this bowl?

As he went on talking to the two brothers, he became aware that a small flower-seed had balanced itself, in its aimless flight, on the bowl at Darnley’s feet, and he began to feel as if this flower-seed were tickling the skin of his mind, and that he couldn’t brush it away. Something was fretting him; something was teasing him. What was it?