wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at
first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was
because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good
and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.

I lingered but a moment at the mirror: the second and conclusive
experiment had yet to be attempted; it yet remained to be seen if I had
lost my identity beyond redemption and must flee before daylight from a
house that was no longer mine; and hurrying back to my cabinet, I
once more prepared and drank the cup, once more suffered the pangs
of dissolution, and came to myself once more with the character, the
stature and the face of Henry Jekyll.

That night I had come to the fatal cross-roads. Had I approached my
discovery in a more noble spirit, had I risked the experiment while
under the empire of generous or pious aspirations, all must have been
otherwise, and from these agonies of death and birth, I had come forth
an angel instead of a fiend. The drug had no discriminating action;
it was neither diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the
prisonhouse of my disposition; and like the captives of Philippi, that
which stood within ran forth. At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil,
kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion; and
the thing that was projected was Edward Hyde. Hence, although I had now
two characters as well as two appearances, one was wholly evil, and the
other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous compound of
whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair. The
movement was thus wholly toward the worse.

Even at that time, I had not conquered my aversions to the dryness of
a life of study. I would still be merrily disposed at times; and as my
pleasures were (to say the least) undignified, and I was not only well
known and highly considered, but growing towards the elderly man, this
incoherency of my life was daily growing more unwelcome. It was on this
side that my new power tempted me until I fell in slavery. I had but to
drink the cup, to doff at once the body of the noted professor, and to
assume, like a thick cloak, that of Edward Hyde. I smiled at the notion;
it seemed to me at the time to be humourous; and I made my preparations
with the most studious care. I took and furnished that house in Soho,
to which Hyde was tracked by the police; and engaged as a house