It was not until I was in the train, and the train had started, that I
was able to realize that I was free. During the journey to London my
extraordinary experiences of the past three months detached themselves
from the sum of my existence and became cloaked with that haze of
unreality which belongs to desperate illness or to a tragedy looked back
upon from days of health and peace. Walking down St. James's Street
twenty-four hours after leaving Wiesbaden, J. P. and the yacht and the
secretaries invaded my memory not as things experienced but as things
seen in a play or read in a story long ago.
I lost no time in making myself comfortable in London. Inquiries
directed to the proper quarter soon brought me into touch with a
gentleman to whose skill, I was assured, no voice, however disagreeable,
could fail to respond. I saw my friends, my business associates, my
tailor. I went to see Fanny's First Play three times, the National
Portrait Gallery twice, the National Gallery once, and laid out my plans
to see all the places in London (shame forbidding me to enumerate them)
which every Englishman ought to have seen and which I had not seen.
This lasted for about two weeks, during which I saw something of Craven,
who had left us in Naples to study something or other in London, and who
was under orders to hold himself in readiness to go to New York with J.
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