e.

CHAPTER XXVI. IN WHICH WE SEE A CONVENTIONAL GENTLEMAN ENDEAVOURING TO
EXAMINE A SPECTRE OF HIMSELF

Dudley rode back to Cronidge with his thunderstroke. It filled him, as
in those halls of political clamour, where explanatory speech is not
accepted, because of a drowning tide of hot blood on both sides. He
sought to win attention by submitting a resolution, to the effect, that
he would the next morning enter into the presence of Mr. Victor Radnor,
bearing his family's feelings, for a discussion upon them. But the
brutish tumult, in addition to surcharging, encased him: he could not
rightly conceive the nature of feelings: men were driving shoals; he had
lost hearing and touch of individual men; had become a house of angrily
opposing parties.

He was hurt, he knew; and therefore he supposed himself injured, though
there were contrary outcries, and he admitted that he stood free; he had
not been inextricably deceived.

The girl was caught away to the thinnest of wisps in a dust-whirl.
Reverting to the father and mother, his idea of a positive injury, that
was not without its congratulations, sank him down among his disordered
deeper sentiments; which were a diver's wreck, where an armoured livid
subtermarine, a monstrous puff-ball of man, wandered seriously light in
heaviness; trembling his hundredweights to keep him from dancing like
a bladder-block of elastic lumber; thinking occasionally, amid the
mournful spectacle, of the atmospheric pipe of communication with the
world above, whereby he was deafened yet sustained. One tug at it, and
he was up on the surface, disengaged from the hideous harness, joyfully
no more that burly phantom cleaving green slime, free! and the roaring
stopped; the world looked flat, foreign, a place of crusty promise.
His wreck, animated by the dim strange fish below, appeared fairer; it
winked lurefully when abandoned.

The internal state of a gentleman who detested intangible metaphor as
heartily as the vulgarest of our gobblegobbets hate it, metaphor only
can describe; and for the reason, that he had in him just something
more than is within the compass of the language of the meat-markets.
He had--and had it not the less because he fain would not have
had--sufficient stuff to furnish forth a soul's epic encounter between
Nature and Circumstance: and metaphor, simile, analysis, all the
fraternity of old lamps for lighting our abysmal darkness, have to be
rubbed, that we may g