The intense excitement of the events had no doubt left my
perceptive powers in a state of erethism.  I remember that dinner
table with extraordinary vividness even now.  My dear wife's sweet
anxious face peering at me from under the pink lamp shade, the white
cloth with its silver and glass table furniture--for in those days
even philosophical writers had many little luxuries--the crimson-purple
wine in my glass, are photographically distinct.  At the end of
it I sat, tempering nuts with a cigarette, regretting Ogilvy's
rashness, and denouncing the shortsighted timidity of the Martians.