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III.
This little man who started the whole thing passes out of the story, and
after a time he passed altogether out of the world of things, visible
and tellable. But because he started the whole thing it is seemly to
give his exit an intercalary page of attention. One may picture him in
his later days as Tunbridge Wells came to know him. For it was at
Tunbridge Wells he reappeared after a temporary obscurity, so soon as he
fully realised how transitory, how quite exceptional and unmeaning that
fury of rioting was. He reappeared under the wing of Cousin Jane,
treating himself for nervous shock to the exclusion of all other
interests, and totally indifferent, as it seemed, to the battles that
were raging then about those new centres of distribution, and about the
baby Children of the Food.
He took up his quarters at the Mount Glory Hydrotherapeutic Hotel, where
there are quite extraordinary facilities for baths, Carbonated Baths,
Creosote Baths, Galvanic and Faradic Treatment, Massage, Pine Baths,
Starch and Hemlock Baths, Radium Baths, Light Baths, Heat Baths, Bran
and Needle Baths, Tar and Birdsdown Baths,--all sorts of baths; and he
devoted his mind to the development of that system of curative treatment
that was still imperfect when he died. And sometimes he would go down in
a hired vehicle and a sealskin trimmed coat, and sometimes, when his
feet permitted, he would walk to the Pantiles, and there he would sip
chalybeate water under the eye of his cousin Jane.
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