Then, slowly, she began to come back. This comment, which would once have struck him as in a league with such banalities as You look so good I could just eat you up now seemed not banal at all.
"She sighed and stood up. She came toward him, not quite staggering but rolling, the way a sailor will when hes just gotten off his ship at the enc of a long voyage. Every "best-sellingwriter of fiction would, he supposed, have his own personal example or examples of radical reader involvement with the make-believe worlds the writer creates. This by itself would not have put him in a state of near-terror — but he remembered coming to Calthorpe Manor the day after Miserys death.
He kept thinking unconsciousness would come and relieve him, but unconsciousness declined; instead Hour Thirty came, and Hour Forty; now King of Pain and Pretty Thirsty merged into one single horse (I Got the Hungries had been left in the dust long since) and he began to feel like nothing more than a slice of living tissue on a microscope slide or a worm on a hook — something, anyway, twisting endlessly and waiting only to die. "Just hot and discouraged.
You forgot, just the way you keep forgetting to change February on that damned calendar. But if he got Careless away from the lions, the counsellor would look at the circle again and ask the games other question, one that recalled his current situation clearly to mind again.