the bedclothes and told to sit still while the bed was moved. I sat
in an armchair, feeling like a bundle of old clothes, and looking at
the cracks in the ceiling which seemed to me like roads. I knew that
I had already lost all importance as an invalid, but I was very
happy nevertheless. For from the window of one of my little houses I
was watching the boys going to school, and my heart was warm with
the knowledge of my own emancipation. As my legs hung down from the
chair I found it hard to keep my slippers on my stockingless feet.

III

There followed for me a period of deep and unbroken
satisfaction. I was soon considered well enough to get up, and I
lived pleasantly between the sofa and the fireside waiting on my
brother's convalescence, for it had been settled that I should
go away with him to the country for a change of air. I read
Dickens and Dumas in English, and made up long stories in which
I myself played important but not always heroic parts. By means
of intellectual exercises of this kind I achieved a tranquillity
like that of an old man, fearing nothing, desiring nothing,
regretting nothing. I no longer reckoned the days or the hours,
I content to enjoy a passionless condition of being that asked
no questions and sought none of me, nor did I trouble to number
my journeys in the world of infinite shadows. But in that long
hour of peace I realised that in some inexplicable way I was
interested in the body of a little boy, whose hands obeyed my
unspoken wishes, whose legs sprawled before me on the sofa. I
knew that before I met him, this boy, whose littleness surprised
me, had suffered ill dreams in a nameless world, and now, worn
out with tears and humiliation and dread of life, he slept, and
while he slept I watched him dispassionately, as I would have
looked at a crippled daddy-long-legs. To have felt compassion
for him would have disturbed the tranquillity that was a
necessary condition of my existence, so I contented myself with
noticing his presence and giving him a small part in the pageant
of my dreams. He was not so beautiful as I wished all my
comrades to be, and he was besides very small; but shadows are
amiable play-friends, and they did not blame him because he
cried when he was teased and did not cry when he was beaten, or
because the wild unreason of his sorrow made him find cause for
tears in the very fullness of his rare enjoyment. For the first
time in m