They had given him a white slate with a stump of pencil tied to the corner. At first he made no use of it. Often he would lie from one meal to the next almost without stirring, sometimes asleep, sometimes dreaming. They were always happy dreams. He was in the Golden Country, or he was sitting among enormous glorious, sunlit ruins, with his mother, with Julia, with O’Brien—not doing anything, merely sitting in the sun, talking of peaceful things. He seemed to have lost the power of intellectual effort, now that the stimulus of pain had been removed. He was not bored, he had no desire for conversation or distraction. Merely to be alone, not to be beaten or questioned, to have enough to eat, and to be clean all over, was completely satisfying.
