By all means
let him go to the theatres in the evenings- and then let him come to
me again in a fortnight."
Had the doctor been less eminent in his profession I should have
doubted whether he was in earnest, but I knew him to be a man of
business who would neither waste his own time nor that of his
patients. As soon as we were out of the house we took a cab to
Regent's Park, and spent a couple of hours in sauntering around the
different houses. Perhaps it was on account of what the doctor had
told me, but I certainly became aware of a feeling I had never
experienced before. I mean that I was receiving an influx of new life,
or deriving new ways of looking at life- which is the same thing- by
the process. I found the doctor quite right in his estimate of the
larger mammals as the ones which on the whole were most beneficial,
and observed that Ernest, who had heard nothing of what the doctor had
said to me, lingered instinctively in front of them. As for the
elephants, especially the baby elephant, he seemed to be drinking in
large draughts of their lives to the re-creation and regeneration of
his own.
We dined in the gardens, and I noticed with pleasure that Ernest's
appetite was already improved.
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