If it is no sin to be young and strange, it is no virtue to be old and weird. As the difference is marked mainly by the movement of the clock’s hands, and it is certain that those hands will move, yesterday’s charming eccentric will surely turn into tomorrow’s repellent oddball. Between yesterday and tomorrow, as wiser men than I have noted, rests today; and today, in the aforementioned illustration, is the day that our Hero reaches the pinnacle of adorable peculiarity, and begins his descent into the abyss of contemptible ridiculousness.
He arrives in a punt. She will arrive, in the next chapter, on a train, but we don’t know about her yet, so picture him, rowing furiously, into the estuary of a well-known river that dissevers a famous city. One famous eccentric rowed his way into oblivion; can you name him? But our Hero, called Man, rows toward infamy. Or obscurity. Or a little bit of both.
Man wore a hat, and glasses, and suspenders. He looked ridiculous because otherwise he was nude. For the sake of propriety he put on his shoes when he arrived at the pier. I should also mention that he wore a moustache; but as he wore it at the back of his head it was seldom remarked upon.
Striding boldly into town, he was arrested and beaten mercilessly. After six days in a coma, with a prodigious debt piling up rapidly, he died, wearing a tube pushed jauntily up his left nostril. No one was more inconvenienced by this unfortunate development than the narrator of this story, who was left somewhat short of a Hero, with a Heroine threatening to descend from a train in the next chapter.
