In the morning he was very ill and I was no longer feverish, so it
was decided to move me back into my own bedroom. I was wrapped up in
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.
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