I
believe he would like to put me in a cage and carry me about with him in
Paris on exhibition. But he is reluctantly prepared to part with me, and
has consented to my return in a few days' time, to England, by the North
German Lloyd steamer. He has ordered the sea voyage as a finishing
touch to my cure. Good, deluded man, he thinks that it is his fortuitous
science that has dragged me out of the Valley of the Shadow and set me
in the Garden of Life. Good, deluded man! He does not realise that he
has been merely the tool of the Arch-Jester. He has no notion of the
sardonic joke his knife was chosen to perpetrate. That naked we should
come into the world, and naked we should go out is a time-honoured
pleasantry which, as far as the latter part of it is concerned, I did
my conscientious best to further; but that we should come into it again
naked at the age of eight-and-thirty is a piece of irony too grim for
contemplation. Yet am I bound to contemplate it. It grins me in the
face. Figuratively, I am naked.
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