Jack laughed.
"And you think you have gone off your head? I'll tell you a secret. Everybody does at first; and then we all fall into the dodge, and go about pretending to understand him."
"But the meaning, Mr. Dunquerque, the meaning?"
"Hush! he hasn't got any. Only no one dares to say so, and it's intellectual to admire him."
"Well, Mr. Dunquerque, I guess I don't want to see that writer at my dinner, anyhow."
"Very well, then. He shall not be asked."
"Another day like this, and you may bury me with my boots on. Come with me somewhere, and have dinner as far away from those volumes of Mr. Browning as we can get in the time."
They dined at Greenwich. In the course of the next three days Gilead Beck read diligently. He did not master the three hundred volumes, but he got through some of the works of every writer, taking them in turn.
The result was a glorious and inextricable mess. Carlyle, Swinburne, Huxley, Darwin, Tennyson, and all of them, were hopelessly jumbled in his brains. He mixed up the Sartor Resartus with the Missing Link, confounded the history of Frederick the Great with that of Queen Elizabeth, and thought that Maud and Atalanta in Calydon were written by the same poet. But time went on, and the Wednesday evening, to which he looked forward with so much anxiety and pride, rapidly drew near.