He was still conscious of an irritation at Mrs. Jordan’s persistent noises below, but he found that he had mounted another step, and another. His eyes were now level with the first landing, one flight up, the floor where the two art students lived, two girls, one of whom looked so much like his sister Margaret. Another step, and he could see the grey plaster figure in the niche in the curved wall, beside the flimsy little electric lamp that always got knocked off when he passed it with his overcoat flapping. He had picked it up a hundred times. There it stood on its perilous edge, its silly imitation parchment shade, with a silhouette of a dancing girl playing a flute, a little askew as always.
He looked at it, really looked at it, as if he had never seen it before, and yet he did not now see it. His ears acutely registered the movements of Mrs. Jordan, and yet he did not hear them. He did hear himself, in his brain somewhere, do you realize that you are going on, going ahead? Do you realize that you don’t at all know what you are doing?