The Captain of his Soul

Three weeks and they were still in London. If they could only have risen
up in the morning of the New Life, and turned their backs on that hateful
flat forever! But, seeing that Mrs. Nevill Tyson was tired out with her
journey from one room to the other, it looked as if the greater removal
was hardly to be thought of yet. The doctor was consulted.

"I must examine the heart," said the man of science.

He examined the heart.

"Better wait another week," he said, shortly. Brevity is the soul of
medical wit; he was a very eminent man, and time also was short.

So they waited a week, three weeks in fact. The delay gave Tyson time to
study the New Life in all its bearings. At first it seemed to him that he
too had attained. He was ready to fall in with all his wife's innocent
schemes. For his own part he looked forward to the coming change with
excitement that was pleasure in itself. He was perfectly prepared for an
open rupture with the past, or, indeed, for any sudden and violent course
of action, the more violent the better. He dreamed of cataclysms and
upheavals, of trunks packed hastily in the night, of flight by express
trains from London, the place of all disaster. His soul would have been
appeased by a telegram.

Instead of telegrams he received doctors' bulletins, contradictory,
ambiguous, elusive. They began to get on his nerves.

Still, there could be no possible doubt that he had attained. At any rate
he had advanced a considerable distance on the way of peace. It looked
like it; he was happy without anything to make him happy, a state which
seemed to be a feature of the New Life.