"Bah!" he said, "I am making a bogey of my own shadow."
And he resolved to take a Turkish bath before dining at the club. He did so, and was baked and kneaded and pummeled and lathered back into a tolerable humor, and, as he lay swathed in warm towels and smoking an excellent cigar, he faced the situation, yielded to it, let it sting and nip at his heart, and was so racked with its pain that he could form no clear idea of it, nor struggle, but only lie limp and pray to God, or whatever devil had let such furies loose upon him, that the worst might soon be over before he was betrayed into any brutal or foolish act. He was amazed to find that his vanity had been slain: it had died in the night of shock, so he diagnosed it. No longer was he concerned with what other people would think of himself. The cruel pain twinged the sharper for it, and he saw that vanity is a protective crust, a shell grown by man to cover his nakedness. . . . His general ideas were clear enough: and the amusement of them served to distract him in his agony. It tickled him to think of a Turkish bath in Jermyn Street as the scene of such a mighty sorrow, and said:
"So much the better for the Turkish bath. It becomes the equal of Troy or Elsinore or the palace of Andromache, and nobler, for mine is a real and no poet's tragedy. It is a true tragedy, or, my vanity being dead, I should not bother my head about it. . . . Is my vanity dead? I have shed it as a crab his claw or a lizard his tail. It will grow again."
He sank deep into pain until it seemed to him he could suffer no more, and then he went over to his club and dined fastidiously--a crab (to inspect its claw), a quail, and a devil on horseback, with a bottle of claret, very deliberately selected in consultation with the head waiter. Throughout his meal he read the wine list from cover to cover and back again, and thought how closely it resembled the Thrigsby school list. It contained so many familiar names that he was put out at its not including Panoukian's, and of Panoukian slowly he began to think: at first sleepily and in the gross content of his good dinner, as a wine, heady, sparkling, inclined to rawness, too soon bottled, or too soon uncorked, he could not be certain which. Then he thought of Panoukian as a man, and a savage anger burst in upon him, and he thought of Panoukian's deed as the atmosphere of the club dictated he should think of it. Panoukian had acted dirtily and dishonorably: he should be hounded out, hounded out. Panoukian had wormed himself into his (Old Mole's) affections and trust, to betray both. He had shown himself a cad, a blackguard, a breaker of the laws of hospitality and good society. . . . There was a solid plumpness in this conception of Panoukian that pleased Old Mole almost sensually, gave him the same sort of mouth-watering anticipation as the breast had done of the quail he had just eaten. He had Panoukian nicely dished up, brown, done to a turn: he would poise the knife for one gloating moment, plunge it in, and cleave the ripe morsel from breast to back. Panoukian had been cooked by his own actions: he deserved the knife and the crunch of teeth. Old Mole, like many another good man wronged, felt ogreish. . . . He began in his head (and with the aid of the wine in his head) to compose letters to Panoukian, commencing "Sir" or "Dear Sir," or, without approach, plunging into such a sentence as: "No matter how public the place, or how painful to myself, I shall, when I next meet you, be obliged to thrash you."