In The Time Machine, how do the guests react to the tale of the Time Traveller's adventure?

The Time Traveller himself anticipates that the account of
his adventure would be met with absolute scepticism, and he is right. Of course, his own
vague sense of what had happened and whether it was real or not does not necessarily
help matters much either. The editor, for example, responds to the Time Traveller by
saying, "What a pity it is you're not a writer of stories!" The medical man asks of the
flowers that the Time Traveller brought back with him from the future, "Where did you
really get them?" The Time Traveller himself then feels the urge to look upon the
machine to prove that he did actually travel through time, deliberately casting his own
adventure into doubt by saying:

readability="10">

I'm damned if it isn't all going. This room and
you and the atmosphere of everyday is too much for my memory. Did I ever make a Time
Machine, or a model of a Time Machine? Or is it all only a dream? They say life is a
dream, a precious poor dream at times--but I can't stand another that won't fit. It's
madness. And where did the dream come from? I must look at that machine. If there
is
one!

To the Time
Traveller himself, then, his story, now that he has told it, has the quality of an
insubstantial dream, and he feels the compulsive need to check the reality of his Time
Machine to assure himself of the truth of his adventure. Lastly, the narrator himself,
we are told, thought the adventure a "gaudy lie." It is only when he returns and sees
the Time Traveller disappearing that he has cause to question his
judgement.