gain. To endure with a grave face this
perfectly unreasonable universe wherein destiny has locked me is
undoubtedly meritorious; but to bustle about it like a caged canary,
and not ever to falter in your hilarity, is heroic. Let us, by all
means, not consider the obdurate if gilded barriers, but rather the
lettuce and the cuttle-bone. I have my choice between becoming a
corpse or a convict--a convict? ah, undoubtedly a convict, sentenced to
serve out a life-term in a cess-pool of castby superstitions."

He smiled now over Paul Vanderhoffen's rage. "Since the situation is
tragic, let us approach it in an appropriate spirit of frivolity. My
circumstances bully me. And I succumb to irrationality, as rational
persons invariably end by doing. But, oh, dear me! oh, Osiris,
Termagaunt, and Zeus! to think there are at least a dozen other
ne'er-do-wells alive who would prefer to make a mess of living as a
grand-duke rather than as a scribbler in Grub Street! Well, well! the
jest is not of my contriving, and the one concession a sane man will
never yield the universe is that of considering it seriously."

And he strode on, resolved to be Prince Fribble to the last.

"Frivolity," he said, "is the smoked glass through which a civilized
person views the only world he has to live in. For, otherwise, he
could not presume to look upon such coruscations of insanity and remain
unblinded."

This heartened him, as a rounded phrase will do the best of us. But
by-and-bye,

"Frivolity," he groaned, "is really the cheap mask incompetence claps
on when haled before a mirror."

And at Leamington Manor he found her strolling upon the lawn. It was
an ordered, lovely scene, steeped now in the tranquillity of evening.
Above, the stars were losing diffidence. Below, and within arms'
reach, Mildred Claridge was treading the same planet on which he
fidgeted and stuttered.

Something in his heart snapped like a fiddle-string, and he was
entirely aware of this circumstance. As to her eyes, teeth, coloring,
complexion, brows, height and hair, it is needless to expatiate. The
most painstaking inventory of these chattels would necessarily be
misleading, because the impression which they conveyed to him was that
of a bewildering, but not distasteful, transfiguration of the universe,
apt as a fanfare at the entrance of a queen.

But he would be Prince Fribble to the last. And so, "Wait just a
moment, please," he said, "I want to har