My next thought was of money. So far I had found nothing but the few odd coins in my pockets; but that I had plenty of it somewhere I took as a matter of course. I know now by experience that people in the habit of having money and people in the habit of not having it are led by different "senses." In the one case it is a sense of limitation; in the other of liberty. It is like the difference between the movements of a blind man and those of one who can see—a tactful feeling of every step in contrast with the ease to come and go. Of all the distractions induced by poverty and wealth it is one that appeals to me now as the most significant. Merely to do without things, or merely to possess things, is matter of little importance. A man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth, we are told on high authority; but it does consist in his state of mind. To be always in a state of mind in which restriction is instinctive is like always creeping as a baby and never learning to walk.
But as far as money went I was free. I had never been without it. I had no conception of a life in which I couldn’t spend as much as I reasonably wished. As I had been in Europe, I probably had a letter of credit somewhere, if I could only put my hand on it. On arriving in New York I should of course have access to my bank-account.
It occurred to me to look under my pillow, and there, sure enough, was a little leather purse. That it was a common little purse was secondary to the fact that it was filled. Sitting on the edge of the couch, I opened it with fingers that shook with my excitement. It contained three five-hundred-franc notes, two for a hundred, some hundred and fifty in gold, and a little silver, nearly four hundred dollars in all. I seemed to know that roughly it was the kind of sum I generally carried on my person when abroad.
After a hasty scrubbing up I crept back into bed, and waited for Jean-Marie to bring my breakfast.
It was my first thought that I must not let him see that anything was wrong. I must let no one see that. The reason I had given him for my extraordinary sleep, that of having long suffered from insomnia and being relieved by the sea air, would have to pass, too, with Drinkwater’s friend the doctor, should he come to see me. No one, no one, must suspect that for so much as an hour the sense of my identity had escaped me. The shame I felt at that—a shame I have since learned to be common to most victims of the same mishap—was overwhelming. Rather than confess it I could own to nearly anything in the nature of a crime.