indifference to the prescription, as of no instant requirement, he
pursued his course, resembling mentally the wanderer along a misty beach,
who hears cannon across the waters.

He certainly had felt it. He remembered the shock: he could not remember
much of pain. How about intimations? His asking caused a smile.

Very soon the riddle answered itself. He had come into view of the
diminutive marble cavalier of the infantile cerebellum; recollecting a
couplet from the pen of the disrespectful Satirist Peter, he thought of a
fall: his head and his elbow responded simultaneously to the thought.

All was explained save his consequent rightabout from the chemist's shop:
and that belongs to the minor involutions of circumstances and the will.
It passed like a giver's wrinkle. He read the placards of the Opera;
reminding himself of the day when it was the single Opera-house; and now
we have two-or three. We have also a distracting couple of Clowns and
Pantaloons in our Pantomimes: though Colney says that the multiplication
of the pantaloon is a distinct advance to representative truth--and
bother Colney! Two Columbines also. We forbear to speak of men, but
where is the boy who can set his young heart upon two Columbines at once!
Victor felt the boy within him cold to both: and in his youth he had
doated on the solitary twirling spangled lovely Fairy. The tale of a
delicate lady dancer leaping as the kernel out of a nut from the arms of
Harlequin to the legalized embrace of a wealthy brewer, and thenceforth
living, by repute, with unagitated legs, as holy a matron, despite her
starry past, as any to be shown in a country breeding the like
abundantly, had always delighted him. It seemed a reconcilement of
opposing stations, a defeat of Puritanism. Ay, and poor women!--women in
the worser plight under the Puritan's eye. They may be erring and good: