"Oi feel loike a fishpond, sor," he complained.
They hurried to the nearest Turkish bath and Pat stripped and got upon the scales. He weighed one hundred and sixty-five pounds and three ounces. Pat was perspiring violently.
"If you sweat, I'll murder you!" said Wheaton.
They appeared before the Commission, Wheaton watching everything like a hawk, his heart in his mouth as the weighing test came. One hundred and sixty-five pounds and one ounce! There was no getting around it!
"Pat," said Wheaton, later, "You're on the force now and you've had a lesson in practical politics. You ought to be a sergeant in no time."
"Politics is aisy," said Pat, "but Oi'm thinkin' Oi'll be changin' me diet. Oi'm forninst beer and bread and butther forever—an'" he added, reflectively, "Oi dunno but wather, too!"
"He's making a good policeman," concluded the Commissioner.
So ended the relation of Pat's experience, and, a little later, the laughing group in the smoking room dissolved itself. Stafford sought his berth, largely recovered from his discontent and more like his reliant self. But he was not assured as to his dreams. Would his conscience be with him still? Could the line of conventional demarcation between him and the Far Away Lady be rigorously preserved, even in them?
But no dreams came to him at once. He could not sleep at first but struggled with himself. He was tumultuous and impatient with his environment and obligations, all, seemingly, standing in the way of his happiness. He was lost, utterly, in the old conflict which comes with the hesitation between the recognized right and wrong, the accepted thing at the time in the age of the earth in which he lived? To his aid, he quoted to himself the sayings of the keen thinkers, the abstract reasoners: he thought of Anatole France: "What is morality? Morality is the rule of custom and custom is the rule of habit. Morality is, then, the rule of habit. Morality changes, continually with custom, of which it is only the general idea." He thought of the others, too, of one who reasoned from the fact that there were a Jewish morality, a Christian morality, a Buddhist morality, and all that. In his half sleep he mumbled; "Why, Reason is the thing," and then he added mumblingly and reflectively, "but then we have learned that there is a right and reason must end by being right. There is a right—we know that; we feel it—and we know what it is. It is, largely, a subordination, a regard for others. We cannot quite justify ourselves for any selfishness by quoting some great law of nature. Conscience, somehow, has become the greatest of these laws."
And so, vaguely and jumblingly, as his senses oozed into sleep, he quoted failingly, the cold thinkers. Then the real dreams came to him, but they were misty and bizarre. He was with the Far Away Lady, but the surroundings were all strange and she was most elusive. They were in a great house and he could hear her voice but he could not find her, though he searched from room to room. Then they were in a forest where there were many flowers and tall trees and she was a bird somewhere up in the trees and he could hear her singing, but he could not see her amid the foliage. And, finally, they were where there was much shrubbery and where he could see her plainly enough, but she was at a distance and as he followed she would disappear among the roses down some garden path. All was most tantalizing and fantastic. And so his night passed.