I wouldn't have known what to do with such an attractive part of the world swimming around in a tub owned in part by the Duchess. Fortunately the Duchess came in and seized the attractive part of the world and made it her own, to match the tub in that quality.
How I got into the royal palace is odd. I know I was there, and it had something to do with the pavement, contortions or swoons (I am cheesy, but after all the pavement reared up)--I must have effectively swum right in through one of the holes in the palace that weren't intended for land dwellers' entrance or absence of same: delivered myself, just made myself part and parcel of a systematic bereavement of morals by age without the requisite training in strength against untoward visions. (Perceived thus as a danger I limped around softly--but the Duchess is known for her sensitivity.)
The bathtub was splendid and apparently filled with the Duchess's taste, so I guessed it was something to do with the Duchess, perhaps linked by ownership, even. I was right. It is not very often I find myself downed by a bathtub, but I hardly stood in place without swimming about, and things turned green and blue and finally black.
When I awoke the bathtub was in its last-mentioned state, filled by a very attractive part of the world, obviously of some rank or other (who wasn't?), sudsing herself in a way that signalled a talent for just about everything, mostly things I could hardly imagine--such laving in the heart of cowardice, it suddenly occurred to me, for I hated the palace.
There was more, but of course the Duchess, large as always in the public eye (which now happened to be just my own), came attending her morsel and I was caught with attentions in all the wrong places and, caught off guard, I was regaled with certain things' happening in orders I didn't quite know.
The hole I got to know was twenty feet wide and contained about thirty other fellows of some distinction and yet not quite so much as my own, and they thought me so odd as to agree to relinquishing rights to a decent burial in many lands until one night the Duchess herself descended in purple as thick as doom, and she opened a discourse on tragedy which ended with a tiny treatise on dwarves: "And proper to them is liquidity."
Many somewhat attractive things got thought thereafter, as I learned from a series of actions upon my person that left me spellbound by something akin to eternity hovering above and to the left of me in the freakish pink darkness of my relative solitude. I call them "attractive" because of the nature of us, the sort of rope we are heaved by, the coin of our slide.
Now I believe only in the supreme terrific principles known here and there by names unrepeatable, believed by people in darkening corners of famous cities here and abroad, a great, taut knowing that it feels rather pleasant to dwell in.
There are other methods of knowing--and by the way, I am free, now, roaming the places, not in a cell with the many distinct, no longer a boy but certainly vague and vital--and I have explored them all: the method of swagger-and-sup, the method of Turkestan Abrightening, the method of daze. But there is a difference. I am very aware of a difference.
When I think of the Duchess's bathtub and things plowing down my attention and life going on in manifold swoons to the parquet, I laugh and men see me laughing and I must explain myself with a frown and a constellation of brooding abutted by books. That is not so unpleasant, but there are better ways to remain out of glances, such as being of different stock, not human. But that will not happen, and the things I know are forever, and nothing will stop me from laughing, and effort is no great mustard.
Breakfast was serene and I ventured forth to unearth some pastures from below the dirt that had accumulated over the centuries since Sadie had arrived from the far ends of the earth and dined and enjoyed some time and breakfasted now, and the pastures were fairly okay and I put some cow dung down and some people surrounded me and that was okay and I went back and lunched on some food.