You may dress." Hiram dressed, seated himself.

By chance he was opposite a huge image from the Orient, a hideous, twisted thing with a countenance of sardonic sagacity.

As he looked he began to see perverse, insidious resemblances to the physician himself.

When Schulze reappeared and busied himself writing, he looked from the stone face to the face of flesh with fascinated repulsion--the man and the "familiar" were so ghastly alike.
Then he suddenly understood that this was a quaint double jest of the eccentric physician's--his grim fling at his lack of physical charm, his ironic jeer at the superstitions of Saint X.
"There!" said Schulze, looking up.

"That's the best I can do for you." "What's the matter with me ?" "You wouldn't know if I told you." "Is it serious ?" "In this world everything is serious--and nothing." "Will I die ?" Schulze slowly surveyed all Hiram's outward signs of majesty that had been denied his own majestic intellect, noted the tremendous figure, the shoulders, the forehead, the massive brow and nose and chin--an _ensemble_ of unabused power, the handiwork of Nature at her best, a creation worth while, worth preserving intact and immortal.
"Yes," he answered, with satiric bitterness; "you will have to die, and rot, just like the rest of us." "Tell me!" Hiram commanded.