“Potter!” he called—then, “Dear me! how stupid!” Potter, he remembered, was at his aunt’s funeral—or was it christening?
He found the coat on the far side of the bed, where, careless of everything, ill and miserable, he had cast it before flinging himself between the blankets. Strange he should have felt so ill overnight, when now——
He slapped his chest and sang an arpeggio.
“La-di-da-daa! Resonant, my boy, and of good timbre.”
“Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate.”
He stooped to pick up his hat, and kicked it clown-fashion right across the room. A second effort was more successful, but, oddly enough, the pattern of the carpet photographed itself vividly upon the retina of his eyes. He was still aware of it when he returned to the perpendicular.
There were angles and shapes in yellow and green on a red ground which danced before them as he descended the stairs—the stairs that had such an awkward twist he had never before noticed. “They tell me,” he gravely announced to Mrs. Beecher, who had come into the hall at the sound of his approach, “they tell me that one of the most difficult achievements is to put a spiral staircase into perspective.”
“Aye—well, a’ve put soup on table; you ought to take cab to theatre,” responded the good lady.
Eliphalet was touched to a point of exaggeration.