With this fair prospect of leaving a choice of a perdition between the couple of unfortunates, for them to fight and lose all their virtues over, Adrian said, “Good morning.”

Mrs. Berry touchingly arrested him.  “You won’t refuse a piece of his cake, Mr. Harley?”

“Oh, dear, no, ma’am,” Adrian turned to the cake with alacrity.  “I shall claim a very large piece.  Richard has a great many friends who will rejoice to eat his wedding-cake.  Cut me a fair quarter, Mrs. Berry.  Put it in paper, if you please.  I shall be delighted to carry it to them, and apportion it equitably according to their several degrees of relationship.”

Mrs. Berry cut the cake.  Somehow, as she sliced through it, the sweetness and hapless innocence of the bride was presented to her, and she launched into eulogies of Lucy, and clearly showed how little she regretted her conduct.  She vowed that they seemed made for each other; that both, were beautiful; both had spirit; both were innocent; and to part them, or make them unhappy, would be, Mrs. Berry wrought herself to cry aloud, oh, such a pity!

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