To confess that he had not the courage to inquire was as good as an
acknowledgment that he knew too much for an innocent questioner. And
what did he know? His brother Philip's fair angel forbade him to open
the door upon what he knew. He took a peep through fancy's keyhole, and
delighted himself to think that he had seen nothing.

After a turbulent night with Schinderhannes, who let him go no earlier
than the opening of a December day, Patrick hied away to one of the dusky
nooks by the lake for a bracing plunge. He attributed to his desire for
it the strange deadness of the atmosphere, and his incapacity to get an
idea out of anything he looked on: he had not a sensation of cold till
the stinging element gripped him. It is the finest school for the cure
of dreamers; two minutes of stout watery battle, with the enemy close all
round, laughing, but not the less inveterate, convinced him that, in
winter at least, we have only to jump out of our clothes to feel the
reality of things in a trice. The dip was sharpening; he could say that
his prescription was good for him; his craving to get an idea ceased with
it absolutely, and he stood in far better trim to meet his redoubtable
adversary of overnight; but the rascal was a bandit and had robbed him of
his purse; that was a positive fact; his vision had gone; he felt himself
poor and empty and rejoicing in the keenness of his hunger for breakfast,
singularly lean. A youth despoiled of his Vision and made sensible by
the activity of his physical state that he is a common machine, is eager
for meat, for excess of whatsoever you may offer him; he is on the
highroad of recklessness, and had it been the bottle instead of
Caroline's coffee-cup, Patrick would soon have received a priming for a
delivery of views upon the sex, and upon love, and the fools known as
lovers, acrid enough to win the applause of cynics.