Even his face was new. A sudden and irresistible
impulse had led him to the barber-shop in his hotel
at the outset; he could not wait till after breakfast
to have his beard removed. The result, when he beheld
it in the mirror, had not been altogether reassuring.
The over-long, thin, tawny moustasche which survived
the razor assumed an undue prominence; the jaw and chin,
revealed now for the first time in perhaps a dozen years,
seemed of a sickly colour, and, in some inexplicable way,
misshapen. Many times during the day, at his office,
at the restaurant where he lunched, at various outfitters'
shops which he had visited, he had pursued the task of getting
reconciled to this novel visage in the looking-glass.
The little mirrors in the hansom cabs had helped him
most in this endeavour. Each returned to him an image
so different from all the others--some cadaverous,
some bloated, but each with a spontaneous distortion
of its own--that it had become possible for him to strike
an average tolerable to himself, and to believe in it.

His sister had recognized him upon the instant, when he
entered the old book-shop to get the money promised overnight,
but in the City his own clerks had not known him at first.
There was in this an inspiring implication that he had
not so much changed his appearance as revived his youth.
The consciousness that he was in reality still a young
man spread over his mind afresh, and this time he felt
that it was effacing all earlier impressions. Why, when he
thought of it, the delight he had had during the day