For someone who can't heat his own water, it seems like folly to visit the baths in the freezing cold during the late-night off-hours when the water is equally frozen. But Simon has always taken pride in being mostly impervious to winter chill, and sometimes a modest little washbasin in one's room just doesn't cut it.

He'll be all right, he's sure. Just a nice soak and scrub with actual immersion, so he can feel really genuinely clean. A symbolic start to the year, if nothing else. And he's likely enough to have the place to himself--all the better, he thinks, as he shucks off his layers of worn-out winter clothing and tosses them carelessly aside.