Poor Hippias was now so reduced that he had profoundly to calculate whether a particular dish, or an extra-glass of wine, would have a bitter effect on him and be felt through the remainder of his years.  He was in the habit of uttering his calculations half aloud, wherein the prophetic doubts of experience, and the succulent insinuations of appetite, contended hotly.  It was horrible to hear him, so let us pardon Adrian for tempting him to a decision in favour of the moment.

“Happy to take wine with you,” Adrian would say, and Hippias would regard the decanter with a pained forehead, and put up the doctor.

“Drink, nephew Hippy, and think of the doctor to-morrow!” the Eighteenth Century cheerily ruffles her cap at him, and recommends her own practice.

“It’s this literary work!” interjects Hippias, handling his glass of remorse.  “I don’t know what else it can be.  You have no idea how anxious I feel.  I have frightful dreams.  I’m perpetually anxious.”

“No wonder,” says Adrian, who enjoys the childish simplicity to which an absorbed study of his sensational existence has brought poor Hippias.  “No wonder.  Ten years of Fairy Mythology!  Could anyone hope to sleep in peace after that?  As to your digestion, no one has a digestion who is in the doctor’s hands.  They prescribe from dogmas, and don’t count on the system.  They have cut you down from two bottles to two glasses.  It’s absurd.  You can’t sleep, because your system is crying out for what it’s accustomed to.”

Hippias sips his Madeira with a niggerdly confidence, but assures Adrian that he really should not like to venture on a bottle now:  it would be rank madness to venture on a bottle now, he thinks.  Last night only, after partaking, under protest, of that rich French dish, or was it the duck?—­Adrian advised him to throw the blame on that vulgar bird.—­Say the duck, then.  Last night, he was no sooner stretched in bed, than he seemed to be of an enormous size all his limbs—­his nose, his mouth, his toes—­were elephantine!  An elephant was a pigmy to him.  And his hugeousness seemed to increase the instant he shut his eyes.  He turned on this side; he turned on that.  He lay on his back; he tried putting his face to the pillow; and he continued to swell.  He wondered the room could hold him—­he thought he must burst it—­and absolutely lit a candle, and went to the looking-glass to see whether he was bearable.

By this time Adrian and Richard were laughing uncontrollably.  He had, however, a genial auditor in the Eighteenth Century, who declared it to be a new disease, not known in her day, and deserving investigation.  She was happy to compare sensations with him, but hers were not of the complex order, and a potion soon righted her.  In fact, her system appeared to be a debatable ground for aliment and medicine, on which the battle was fought, and, when over, she was none the worse, as she joyfully told Hippias.  Never looked ploughman on prince, or village belle on Court Beauty, with half the envy poor nineteenth-century Hippias expended in his gaze on the Eighteenth.  He was too serious to note much the laughter of the young men.