From an outer-worldly point of view his attendants’ good will was a trifle hail-fellow. But he was grateful for it. They were fairies, visible and well disposed, who might be useful as teachers of their native tongue; and they had the merit of being reliably available. When he went upstairs into good society it was disconcerting to find himself alone, as he often did.

Accustomed to a methodical social order where time is respected and persons occupy the portion of space where you expect to find them, he reconciled himself to the vagaries of Foxcastle by seeing it as an exemplification of the Fay ce que vouldras of Thélème. What would next be wished and when, and for how long, and by how many was unforeseeable. They were fickle in their loves and hates, fickle and passionate in their pursuits. Some devoted themselves to astronomy. Others practised the French horn. Others educated squirrels. Some, he presumed, made measurements. Only one thing was certain: they never quarrelled. Even in their fickle hates, they hated without malice. Whisking from one pursuit to the next, they never collided. The best comparison he could draw from the outer world was the swarm of mayflies, indivisibly borne aloft, lowering, shifting, veering, like a shaken impermeable gauze veil over the face of a stream.

Somewhere beneath her court the Queen of Foxcastle sat in her private apartments and knitted. Fay ce que vouldras. She was devoted to knitting and never tired of it. When his attendants told him this, and that if she had no more wool at hand she unravelled her work and knitted it up again, he exclaimed ‘Penelope!’ But of course they had never heard of Penelope.

Though by now he had learned enough Elfin to be able to converse in it, and was considering a treatise of Elfin Grammar, he found it difficult to acclimatize himself to a society which had not a vestige of mortal scholarship—except in mathematics: the stargazers astonished him by the dexterity of their calculations, looking at him blankly the while if he spoke of Orion or Cygnus. His previous researches into fairies had not prepared him for this divergence between their values and his. They had a practical knowledge of the world; they also knew it was round; but that was the extent of their knowledge; they knew nothing of its ancient history and celebrated characters and did not care to. They had no more than a loose hearsay acquaintance with their own history, and were satisfied to be without any written record of it, since they attached no importance to what might be learned from a book and were amused by the mortal dependence on pen and paper. It was this that blighted his project of the Elfin Grammar. They were not unfriendly to it, and when he explained the laboriousness of inscribing it on tables of stone (another allusion lost on them) a party of working fairies was dispatched to steal a load of paper, while others compounded ink and collected goose quills. But the Grammar was never written, because the load of paper was stolen from a cooked-meats shop, and consisted of a manuscript cantata soaked in grease.