convincing as the bright blue screen by the fire, or the golden brown
rug by the door; but he was dimly aware that, as the days passed, so
did he find more and more to consider in the shapes and sizes between
the deep black frames.... There might, after all, be something in it.

But it was not the pictures that he was now considering.

Before his nurse's descent upon him he was determined that he would
walk--not crawl, but walk in his socks and shoes--from his place by the
window to the blue screen by the fire. There had been days, and those
not so long ago, when so hazardous an Odyssey had seemed the vainest of
Blue Moon ambitions; it had once been the only rule of existence to
sprawl and roll and sprawl again; but gradually some further force had
stirred his limbs. It was a finer thing to be upright; there was a finer
view, a more lordly sense of possession could be summoned to one's
command. That, then, once decided, upright one must be and upright, with
many sudden and alarming collapses, Ernest Henry was.

He had marked out, from the first, the distance from the wall to the blue
screen as a very decent distance. There was, half-way, a large
rocking-chair that would be either a danger or a deliverance, as Fate
should have it. Save for this, it was, right across the brown, rose-strewn
carpet, naked country. Truly a perilous business. As he sat there and
looked at it, his heart a little misgave him; in this strange, new world
into which he had been so roughly hustled, amongst a horde of alarming and
painful occurrences, he had discovered nothing so disconcerting as that
sudden giving of the knees, that rising of the floor to meet you, the
collapse, the pain, and above all the disgrace. Moreover, let him fail
now, and it meant, in short,--banishment--banishment and then darkness.
There were risks. It was the most perilous thing that, in this new