Adrian listened to it as the expression of a matter-of-fact opinion.  He took the huge quarter of cake, nodded multitudinous promises, and left Mrs. Berry to bless his good heart.

“So dies the System!” was Adrian’s comment in the street.  “And now let prophets roar!  He dies respectably in a marriage-bed, which is more than I should have foretold of the monster.  Meantime,” he gave the cake a dramatic tap, “I’ll go sow nightmares.”

CHAPTER XXXII

Adrian really bore the news he had heard with creditable disinterestedness, and admirable repression of anything beneath the dignity of a philosopher.  When one has attained that felicitous point of wisdom from which one sees all mankind to be fools, the diminutive objects may make what new moves they please, one does not marvel at them:  their sedateness is as comical as their frolic, and their frenzies more comical still.  On this intellectual eminence the wise youth had built his castle, and he had lived in it from an early period.  Astonishment never shook the foundations, nor did envy of greater heights tempt him to relinquish the security of his stronghold, for he saw none.  Jugglers he saw running up ladders that overtopped him, and air-balloons scaling the empyrean; but the former came precipitately down again, and the latter were at the mercy of the winds; while he remained tranquil on his solid unambitious ground, fitting his morality to the laws, his conscience to his morality, his comfort to his conscience.  Not that voluntarily he cut himself off from his fellows:  on the contrary, his sole amusement was their society.  Alone he was rather dull, as a man who beholds but one thing must naturally be.  Study of the animated varieties of that one thing excited him sufficiently to think life a pleasant play; and the faculties he had forfeited to hold his elevated position he could serenely enjoy by contemplation of them in others.  Thus:—­wonder at Master Richard’s madness:  though he himself did not experience it, he was eager to mark the effect on his beloved relatives.  As he carried along his vindictive hunch of cake, he shaped out their different attitudes of amaze, bewilderment, horror; passing by some personal chagrin in the prospect.  For his patron had projected a journey, commencing with Paris, culminating on the Alps, and lapsing in Rome:  a delightful journey to show Richard the highways of History and tear him from the risk of further ignoble fascinations, that his spirit might be altogether bathed in freshness and revived.  This had been planned during Richard’s absence to surprise him.