His Friend, the other night, had been real enough.

Fairies, ghosts, goblins and dragons--everything was real.
Everything.

It was all terrible, terrible to think of, but, above and beyond all else, he must not forget, on the day of his departure, that farewell; something disastrous would come upon him were he so ungrateful.
And then he would go downstairs again, down to newspapers and fires, toast and tea, the large print of Frith's "Railway Station," and the coloured supplement of Greiffenhagen's "Idyll," and the tattered numbers of the _Windsor_ and the _Strand_ magazines, and, behold, all these things were real and all the things in the nursery unreal.

Could it be that both worlds were real?
Even now, at his tender years, that old business of connecting the Dream and the Business was at his throat.
"Teal Tea! Tea!" Frantic screams from May.

"There's some new jam, and, John, mother says she wants you to try on some underclothes afterwards.
Those others didn't do, she said...." There came then the disastrous hour--an hour that John was never, in all his after-life, to forget.