, and embroideries on the terrace, as a living wonder. 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.

Partly by my own act, and partly with the help of Destiny (the greater
jester than I) I have stripped myself of all these garments of life
which not only enabled me to strut peacock-fashion in the pleasant
places of the world, but also sheltered me from its inclemencies.

I had wealth--not a Rothschild or Vanderbilt fortune but enough to
assure me ease and luxury. I have stripped myself of it. I have but a
beggarly sum remaining at my bankers. Practically I am a pauper.

I had political position. I surrendered it as airily as I had achieved
it; so airily, indeed, that I doubt whether I could regain it even had
I the ambition. For it was a game that I played, sometimes fascinating,
sometimes repugnant to my fastidious sense of honourable dealing, for
which I shall never recapture the mood. Mood depends on conditions, and
conditions, as I am trying to show, are changed.

I had social position. I did not deceive myself as to its value in the
cosmic scheme, but it was one of the pleasant things to which I was
born, just as I was born to good food and wines and unpatched boots and
the morning hot water brought into my bedroom. I liked it. I suspect
that it has fled into eternity with the spirit of Captain Vauvenarde.
The penniless hero of an amazing scandal is not usually made an idol of
by the exclusive aristocracy of Great Britain.

I had a sweet and loyal woman