How he had cringed at that moment, how alone he had felt! It had shocked him, frightened him, so much that he had not been able to think fast enough to confess that he too had lied, of course he had, more than any of the rest of them! But why had he lied, why? This was what he could not quite recall. Melancholia as a failure of memory, an acute sensation of the irreality of the past, its nonexistence…He
