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: yes, finding the man to lift them the one step up! Read
the history of the error. But presently we shall teach the Puritan to
act by the standards of his religion. All is coming right--must come
right. Colney shall be confounded.

Hereupon Victor hopped on to Fenellan's hint regarding the designs of
Mrs. Burman.

His Nataly might have to go through a short sharp term of
scorching--Godiva to the gossips.

She would come out of it glorified. She would be reconciled with her
family. With her story of her devotion to the man loving her, the world
would know her for the heroine she was: a born lady, in appearance
and manner an empress among women. It was a story to be pleaded in
any court, before the sternest public. Mrs. Burman had thrown her into
temptatio