All his old loathing of sport had come back, and he was getting his old dislike of meat once more, and to sicken at the sight of a butcher's shop; and the sight of a blind man stirred him to the depths ... even when he learnt how happy a blind man can be!
These unhappy things that can't be helped preoccupied him as if he had been twenty, thirty, fifty years older; and the world seemed to him a shocking place, a gray, bleak, melancholy hell where there was nothing but sadness, and badness, and madness.
And bit by bit, but very soon, all his old trust in an all‑merciful, all‑powerful ruler of the universe fell from him; he shed it like an old skin; it sloughed itself away; and with it all his old conceit of himself as a very fine fellow, taller, handsomer, cleverer than anybody else, "bar two or three"! Such darling beliefs are the best stays we can have; and he found life hard to face without them.
And he got as careful of his aunt Caroline, and as anxious about her little fads and fancies and ailments, as if he'd been an old woman himself.
Imagine how she grew to dote on him!
And he quite lost his old liability to sudden freaks and fits of noisy fractiousness about trifles—when he would stamp and rave and curse and swear, and be quite pacified in a moment: "Soupe‑au‑lait," as he was nicknamed in Troplong's studio!
Besides his seton and his cuppings, dry and wet, and his blisters on his arms and back, and his mustard poultices on his feet and legs, and his doses of mercury and alteratives, he had also to deplete himself of blood three times a week by a dozen or twenty leeches behind his left ear and on his temple. All this softens and relaxes the heart towards others, as a good tonic will harden it.
So that he looked a mere shadow of his former self when I went over to spend my Christmas with him.
And his eye was getting worse instead of better; at night he couldn't sleep for the fireworks it let off in the dark. By day the trouble was even worse, as it so interfered with the sight of the other eye—even if he wore a patch, which he hated. He never knew peace but when his aunt was reading to him in the dimly lighted room, and he forgot himself in listening.