He was the prisoner of his word;--rather like the donkeys known as
married men: rather more honourable than most of them. He had to be
present at the ball at the Schloss and behold his loathed Henrietta,
suffer torture of chains to the rack, by reason of his having promised
the bitter coquette he would be there. So hellish did the misery seem to
him, that he was relieved by the prospect of lying a whole day long in
loneliness with the sunshine of the woods, occasionally conjuring up the
antidote face of the wood-sprite before he was to undergo it. But,
as he was not by nature a dreamer, only dreamed of the luxury of being
one, he soon looked back with loathing on a notion of relief to come from
the state of ruminating animal, and jumped up and shook off another of
men's delusions--that they can, if they have the heart to suffer pain,
deaden it with any semi-poetical devices, similar to those which Rufus
Abrane's 'fiddler fellow' practised and was able to carry out because he
had no blood. The spite of a present entire opposition to Woodseer's
professed views made him exult in the thought, that the mouther of
sentences was likely to be at work stultifying them and himself in the
halls there below during the day. An imp of mischief offered consolatory
sport in those halls of the Black Goddess; already he regarded his recent
subservience to the conceited and tripped peripatetic philosopher as
among the ignominies he had cast away on his road to a general contempt;
which is the position of a supreme elevation for particularly sensitive
young men.

Pleasure in the scenery had gone, and the wood-sprite was a flitted
vapour; he longed to be below there, observing Abrane and Potts and the
philosopher confounded, and the legible placidity of Countess Livia.
Nevertheless, he hung aloft, feeding where he could, impatient of the
solitudes, till night, when, according to his guess, the ladies were at
their robing.