“Does one?” Eustace said. “Home you call it!”
He shuddered.
“I call it what I want it to be, what I think it may be, what the poor and the weary and the fallen make it in their lonely thoughts. Let us, at least, hope that we travel towards the east, where the sun is.”
“You have strange fancies,” he said.
“I! Not so strange as yours.”
She looked at him in the eyes as she spoke. He wondered what that look meant. It seemed to him a menace.
“I must keep it up—I must keep it up,” he murmured to himself as he left the room. “Winifred loves fancies—loves me for what she thinks mine.”
He went to his library, and sat down heavily, to devise fresh outrages on the ordinary.
His pranks became innumerable, and Society called him the most original figure of London. The papers quoted him—his doings, not his sayings. People pointed him out in the Park. His celebrity waxed. Even the Marble Arch seemed turning to gaze after him as he went by, showing the observation which the imaginative think into inanimate things.
At least, so a wag declared.