And, while I was doing that, I suffered a queer thing.  Through my closed lids I saw a yellow atmosphere that was fast whitening.  It seemed to smell very sweet; and the sensation of seeing it and smelling it was intoxicatingly delightful.  It was like an opiate.  What Freedham was doing in the atmosphere I know not, but I saw him, as one would in a dream.  An exquisite sleepiness was entrancing me, when the cold water rushed in at my ears and mouth, and with an “Oh!” and a choking, I struggled to the rope.  Dizzily, and feeling a pain in my head and neck, I scrambled out and lay upon the cold sides of the baths.

“Heavens!” thought I.  “That was a close shave.  I must have strained myself and nearly fainted.  Why have I got that ass, Freedham, on the brain?”

At that moment the sound of Jerry Brisket’s return caused me to jump up and dress.  I was quite recovered, but tired and depressed.  And, as a result of the curious conditions of the evening, there seemed to be gathering about me a presentiment of disaster.

When I passed Jerry’s door on my way out of the building, I thought I would like to hear a friendly voice, so I called: 

“Good-night, Jerry.”

He came to the door in his white sweater and white trousers.

“Good-night, Mr. Ray.  Where are you off to now?”

“Well, to tell the truth, I’m off to be walloped.”

Jerry was too courteous to seek particulars.

“Oh, bad luck,” he said.  “Come to the baths this time to-morrow, and it’ll be all over.”

“Oh, I don’t mind, it, Jerry,” I replied.  “Good-night”; and, letting the door swing behind me, I passed out of the baths.

“Good old Jerry,” I murmured sentimentally.  “By Jove, if I could only swim like him!  Dear—­old—­Jerry.”

An unaccountable melancholy overcame me, as I rambled in this strain.  I sighed:  “I think I’m getting too old to be whacked.”

And, as I phrased the thought, walking dreamily outside the baths, the strangest thing of this evening happened.  There seemed to be thrown over me, far more heavily than on that evening up the Fal, the shadow of my oncoming manhood.  And with it came ineffable longings—­longings to live, and to feel; to do, and to be.  The vague wish to avoid the indignity of corporal punishment threw off its cloak and showed itself to be Aspiration.  There, outside the baths, the AEsthetic awoke in me.  The sensation, infinitely sad and yet pleasing, was so complete that it left me hot-cheeked and wondering....

In truth, so warm and all-pervading was it that the other day, when during a short leave from France I stood on the gravel that sweeps to the entrance of the baths, I felt the memory of that moment of yearning egoism hanging over the spot like a restless spirit of the past.

Sec.4