Those scales
hung badly now, lopsidedly. One was up in the clouds. He resolved that
the other should correct it. After a cold bath and a sleep he would go
round to Angelo's and have an hour's hard fencing. Cold water, the
Englishman's panacea for every ill, cold steel, the pioneer's Minerva,
would tonic this errant brain of his and drill it into its customary
obedience. So he said to himself.
And yet as he walked there came to him a notion that this little shadow
of a flame was still his companion; that this night just passed, this
day just begun, were the birthnight and the birthday of this small,
ghostlike thing which had come into being to bear him company, to haunt
him. Yes, as he walked, followed always closely by Rip, and saw the tall
iron gates of the Park, Apsley House, the long line of Piccadilly, all
uncertain, gentle, reduced to a whimsical mildness of aspect in the
half-light of the dawning, he again recalled the fact, which he had
mentioned that night to Doctor Levillier, of people watching an invalid
who had seen, at the precise moment of dissolution, the soul escaping
furtively from its fleshy prison like a flame, which was immediately
lost in the air. Surely, wandering souls, if indeed there were such
things, might still retain this faint semblance of a shape, a form.
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