I feel I may perhaps be sufficiently inured against further upsets, sir.

Perhaps this is a test of sorts that you are meant to undergo alone. [Though the wrinkling of his brow at the practically microscopic level indicates that he disapproves of the very notion]

The poet Edmund Spenser wrote of a set of similarly otherworldly tasks or trials of virtue for a group of knights in his poem The Faerie Queene, although the work has heretofore been considered allegorical-