I thought back to my conversation with my companions over dinner the evening before — somehow those few hours were far more vivid, now, than all the days I had spent in that world of futurity — and I remembered their mix of responses to my account: there had been a general enjoyment of a good tale, accompanied by dashes of sympathy or near-derision depending on the temperaments of individuals — and, I recalled, a near-universal skepticism. Only one good friend, who I shall call the Writer in these pages, had seemed to listen to my ramblings with any degree of sympathy and trust.

Standing by the window, I stretched — and my doubts about my memories took a jolt! The ache of my back was real enough, acute and urgent, as were the burning sensations in the muscles of my legs and arms: protests from the muscles of a no-longer young man forced, against his practice, to exert himself. “Well, then,” I argued with myself, “if your trip into the future was truly a dream — all of it, including that bleak night when you fought the Morlocks in the forest — where have these aches and pains come from? Have you been capering around your garden, perhaps, in a moonstruck delirium?”

And there, dumped without ceremony in a corner of my room, I saw a small heap of clothes: they were the garments I had worn to their ruin during my flight to the future, and which now were fit only to be destroyed. I could see grass stains and scorch marks; the pockets were torn, and I remembered how Weena had used those flaps of cloth as impromptu vases, to load up with the etiolated flowers of the future. My shoes were missing, of course — I felt an odd twinge of regret for the comfortable old house-shoes which I had borne unthinking into a hostile future, before abandoning them to an unimaginable fate! — and there, on the carpet, were the filthy, bloodstained remnants of my socks.