He awoke hearing an airy scuffle overhead. His attendants were flying up and down the gallery, contesting for a pair of stockings. It was gratifying to see them at last, though embarrassing to know he had been in the charge of these flippant young persons. He coughed. They descended looking as grave as tombstone cherubim. When he glanced round for his clothes, they held out new ones. The measuring had certainly not been for these. Everything was too large; the shirt pouted, the sad-green suit would have fitted a Hercules; as for the stockings, they were so inordinately long that they had to be rolled half a dozen times before they could be gartered. He was not a vain man, or luxurious, but he esteemed his legs, and wore silk stockings. These were woollen, and the word that came to his mind was ‘Pictish.’ It struck him that just as the English poets underestimated the size of fairies, fairies over-estimated the size of mortals. The reflection was philosophic, and soothed him; but not entirely. The theory of pockets had defeated the Foxcastle tailor, so he had to hang his watch on a ribbon round his neck and tuck it into the bosom of his shirt, like a loyal Jacobite locket.

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.