The strident, tearing gale in that garden carried away
the stranger's card to join the wild waste paper of the universe;
and that great western wind shook the whole house and passed.




Chapter II

The Luggage of an Optimist


We all remember the fairy tales of science in our infancy, which played
with the supposition that large animals could jump in the proportion
of small ones. If an elephant were as strong as a grasshopper, he could
(I suppose) spring clean out of the Zoological Gardens and alight
trumpeting upon Primrose Hill. If a whale could leap from the sea
like a trout, perhaps men might look up and see one soaring above
Yarmouth like the winged island of Laputa. Such natural energy,
though sublime, might certainly be inconvenient, and much of this
inconvenience attended the gaiety and good intentions of the man in green.
He was too large for everything, because he was lively as well as large.
By a fortunate physical provision, most very substantial creatures
are also reposeful; and middle-class boarding-houses in the lesser
parts of London are not built for a man as big as a bull and excitable
as a kitten.

When Inglewood followed the stranger into the boarding-house,
he found him talking earnestly (and in his own opinion privately)
to the helpless Mrs. Duke. That fat, faint lady could only