They fitted him no longer; they began to fall away
from him. Now, as he stood here on the bustling platform,
it was as if they had all disappeared--been left somewhere
behind him outside the station. With the two large bags
which the porter was looking after--both of a quite
disconcerting freshness of aspect--and the new overcoat
and shining hat, he seemed to himself a new kind of being,
embarked upon a voyage of discovery in the unknown.
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.
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