and bound at the waist with a voluminous gaudy
shawl of Cashmere for girdle; over this a warm wide-flowing torrent of
white drapery, lined with ermine. On my head is the skull-cap, covered
by a high crimson cap with deep-blue tassel; and on my feet is a pair of
thin yellow-morocco shoes, covered over with thick red-morocco
babooshes. My ankles--my ten fingers--my wrists--are heavy with gold and
silver ornaments; and in my ears, which, with considerable pain, I bored
three days since, are two needle-splinters, to prepare the holes for
rings.
* * * * *
O Liberty! I am free....
* * * * *
While I was going to visit my old home in Harley Street that night, at
the very moment when I turned from Oxford Street into Cavendish Square,
this thought, fiercely hissed into my ears, was all of a sudden seething
in me: 'If now I should lift my eyes, and see a man walking yonder--just
yonder--_at the corner there_--turning from Harewood Place into Oxford
Street--what, my good God, should I do?--I without even a knife to run
and plunge into his heart?'
And I turned my eyes--ogling, suspicious eyes of furtive
horror--reluctantly, lingeringly turned--and I peered deeply with
lowered brows across the murky winds at that same spot: but no man was
there.
Hideously frequent is this nonsense now become with me--in streets of
towns--in deep nooks of the country: the invincible assurance that, if I
but turn the head, and glance _there_--at a certain fixed spot--I shall
surely see--I _must_ see--a man. And glance I must, glance I must,
though I perish: and when I glance, though my hairs creep and stiffen
like stirring amobse, yet in my eyes, I know, is monarch indignation
against the intruder, and my neck stands stiff as sovereignty itself,
and on my brow sits more than all the lordship of Persepolis and Iraz.
To what point of wantonness this arrogance of royalty may lead me, I do
not know: I will watch, and see. It is written: 'It is not good for man
to be alone!' But good or no, the arrangement of One planet, One
inhabitant, already seems to me, not merely a natural and proper, but
the _only_ natural and proper, condition; so much so, that any other
arrangement has now, to my mind, a certain improbable, wild, and
far-fetched unreality, like the Utopian schemes of dreamers and
faddists. That the whole world should have been made for _me_
alone--that London should have b
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