He had marked out, from the first, the distance from the wall to the blue
screen as a very decent distance. There was, half-way, a large
rocking-chair that would be either a danger or a deliverance, as Fate
should have it. Save for this, it was, right across the brown, rose-strewn
carpet, naked country. Truly a perilous business. As he sat there and
looked at it, his heart a little misgave him; in this strange, new world
into which he had been so roughly hustled, amongst a horde of alarming and
painful occurrences, he had discovered nothing so disconcerting as that
sudden giving of the knees, that rising of the floor to meet you, the
collapse, the pain, and above all the disgrace. Moreover, let him fail
now, and it meant, in short,--banishment--banishment and then darkness.
There were risks. It was the most perilous thing that, in this new
country, he had yet attempted, but attempt it he would.... He was as
obstinate as his chin could make him.
With his blue eyes still cautiously upon his nurse's shadow he raised
himself very softly, his fat hand pressed against the wall, his mouth
tightly closed, and from between his teeth there issued the most distant
relation of that sound that the traditional ostler makes when he is
cleaning down a horse.
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