Somehow it
seemed to be associated with consciousness, for after this the sense of
the reality of things grew dim and blurred to him. He ceased to know
exactly what he was doing. His intellectual parts dropped away one by
one, leaving only the instincts, the blind, unreasoning impulses of the
animal.
Still he continued his restless, lurching walk back and forth in his
room, his head hanging low and swinging from side to side with the
movement of his gait. He had become so nervous that the restraint
imposed upon his freedom of movement by his bathrobe and his loose
night-clothes chafed and irritated him. At length he had stripped off
everything.
Suddenly and without the slightest warning Vandover's hands came slowly
above his head and he dropped forward, landing upon his palms. All in an
instant he had given way, yielding in a second to the strange
hallucination of that four-footed thing that sulked and snarled. Now
without a moment's stop he ran back and forth along the wall of the
room, upon the palms of his hands and his toes, a ludicrous figure, like
that of certain clowns one sees at the circus, contortionists walking
about the sawdust, imitating some kind of enormous dog.
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