The doctor lit a cigar, and leaned back in a deep arm-hair.  And he began to study that cheery letter almost as a detective studies the plan of a house in which a crime has been committed.  When his cigar was smoked out, he laid the letter aside, but he still refrained for a while from going to bed.  His mind was far away on the Nile.  Never had he seen the Nile.  Should he go to see it, soon, this year, this spring?  He remembered a morning’s ride, when the air of London was languorous, had seemed for a moment almost exotic.  That air had made him wish to go away, far away, to the land where he would be really at home, where he would be in “his own place.”  And then he had imagined a distant country where all romances unwind their shining coils.  And he had longed for events, tragic, tremendous, horrible, even, if only they were unusual.  He had longed for an incentive which would call his secret powers into supreme activity.

Should he go to the Nile very soon—­this spring?

He looked again at the letter.  He read again those apparently insignificant words: 

“She packed off her French maid, so as to be quite free.”

XXVIII

The next day was Sunday.  Meyer Isaacson had no patients and no engagements.  He had deliberately kept the day free, in order that he might study, and answer a quantity of letters.  He was paying the penalty of his great success, and was one of the hardest worked men in London.  At the beginning of the New Year he had even broken through his hitherto inflexible rule, and now he frequently saw patients up till half-past seven o’clock.  He dined out much less than in former days, and was seldom seen at concerts and the play.  Success, like a monster, had gripped him, was banishing pleasure from his life.  He worked harder and harder, gained ever more and more money, rose perpetually nearer to the top of his ambition.  Not long ago royalty had called him in for the first time, and been pleased to approve both of him personally and of his professional services.  The future, no doubt, held a title for him.  All the ultra-fashionable world thronged to consult him.  Even since the Armines’ departure he had gone up several rungs of the ladder.  His strong desire to “arrive”—­and arrival in his mind meant far more than it does in the minds of most men—­and his acute pleasure in adding perpetually to his fortune, drove him incessantly onward.  In his few free hours he was slowly and laboriously writing a work on poisons, the work for which he had been preparing in Italy during his last holiday.  On this Sunday he meant to devote some hours to it.  But first he would “get through” his letters.