QUITE ALONE.

BOOK THE SECOND: WOMANHOOD.
CHAPTER XXXVII. ON THE RIVER-BANK.

HE who writes these lines was, many years
since, dining in a cheap restaurant in the Palais
Royal. He liked to dine in state; but, being
poor, was forced to put up with the second-floor
splendour of the great Palace of Gormandising.
The glass is as glittering, and the gilding as
gaudy in the attic as in the basement of this
place, only, there is a diminution of price
correspondent to the ascent you make, and, by
an odd paradox, you lose caste as you mount.
What matters it? If that which they call a
poulet à la Marengo on the first floor be, as they
assert, a nasty mess hashed up from the scourings
and leavings of better cook-shops, and the
poulet downstairs be a triumph of the art in which
Carême and Ude excelled, it must come to the
same thing in the long run. Abate a little for
the difference in flavour—and what is flavour?
Is there anything nastier than an olive, or caviar,
or the trail of a woodcock, at first tasting? You
will find both dishes equally rich in colour,
multifarious in ingredients, rich and sloppy.
And both will make you equally bilious the next
morning.

He of whom I write, then, being pinched in
purse, dined, not at Véfour's below, but at the
humbler Richard's above. He had some youth
and health remaining, then. He could look upon
the wine when it was red, or even when it was
the lividest ordinaire ever manufactured, without
dreading its after effects. He paid his
forty sous; had his three courses; fed, and was
content.

Now here was a thing which struck him between
his third service and his dessert, on the
instant occasion consisting of a pear—a pear so
swollen, supine and sleepy, that, being a Radical
young man at that period, he likened it to an
Elder Brother of the Trinity House. The thing
struck him thus. Richard's is very brave indeed,
in looking-glasses. There are mirrors on every
side of you. Though ever so solitary at a table,
you need never, if reflexion can help it, be
alone. You have the company of yourself.
Eyes right and eyes left, and then turn volte-
face: so you are quadrupled. You become twins
twice over: quins, if I may coin such a
word.

The person discoursed of, however, was
satisfied with using the knife, fork, and plate
before him as a plane of perspective, and looked
straight before him without changing his base.
In front of him was a very large looking-glass in
a very gay gold frame. Naturally, in this he saw
himself. Naturally, also, he saw reflected in
the looking-glass which was at the other end of
the dining-hall, another self of his, taken dorsally.
And, in equal obedience to the immutable laws of
nature, the starting-points of reflexion and refraction
being once established, there stretched
before him an interminable vista of mirrors that
were before and mirrors that were behind, of
front selves and back selves, of table-knives,
forks, and chandeliers over and over again, to
infinity. So, lately, standing upon a high tower
upon a rock, looking upon the Falls of Niagara,
did this same person ask, unthinkingly, and like
a fool as he was, of the negro who was his
guide, whether the rush of waters were always
in that wise: whereon the black man answered
him, not according to his folly, but in simple
wisdom: " I 'spect, mas'r, it's gwine on so for
ebber and ebber." For ever and ever. The
solemn words brought the scene of the looking-
glass back to his mind. They too went on for ever
and ever. Although the vanishing lines of the
perspective diminished at last to a pin's point, and
their continuity was undiscernible to the keenest
gaze, there must have stretched on, more and
more microscopically delineated, myriads upon
myriads more looking-glasses, tables, knives,
forks, and diners. The old schoolmen used to
hold disputations on the numbers of legions of
angels that could dance on the point of a needle.
The thesis is not so absurd as it seems. Give
us but a lens of sufficient magnifying power,
and we might discover how upon some spicula
of matter ten thousand times finer than a
"Coventry hundred," not thousands, but
millions of God's creatures, having heads, and
lungs, and ducts, and bowels, and lives, do
dance.

The looking-glasses, then, went on for ever and
ever. There could not be an end to them, for
they had two ends. There could not be a
beginning, for there were two beginnings, or
rather the beginning was the end, and the end
was the beginning, for the foremost mirror did
no more and no less in glancing back its fellow