On the third, he soared across middle France,
and within sight of the snow-clad Alps. These vigorous exercises gave him
restful sleep; he recovered almost wholly from the spiritless anemia of
his first awakening. And whenever he was not in the air, and awake,
Lincoln was assiduous in the cause of his amusement; all that was novel
and curious in contemporary invention was brought to him, until at last
his appetite for novelty was well-nigh glutted. One might fill a dozen
inconsecutive volumes with the strange things they exhibited. Each
afternoon he held his court for an hour or so. He found his interest in
his contemporaries becoming personal and intimate. At first he had been
alert chiefly for unfamiliarity and peculiarity; any foppishness in their
dress, any discordance with his preconceptions of nobility in their
status and manners had jarred upon him, and it was remarkable to him how
soon that strangeness and the faint hostility that arose from it,
disappeared; how soon he came to appreciate the true perspective of his
position, and see the old Victorian days remote and quaint. He found
himself particularly amused by the red-haired daughter of the Manager of
the European Piggeries. On the second day after dinner he made the
acquaintance of a latter-day dancing girl, and found her an astonishing
artist. And after that, more hypnotic wonders. On the third day Lincoln
was moved to suggest that the Master should repair to a Pleasure City,
but this Graham declined, nor would he accept the services of the
hypnotists in his aeronautical experiments.
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