He broke off. He began to search through his discarded garments and to stow his few possessions into the pockets of his new attire.
“All folly!” ran his thoughts. “I am consumed with it all of a sudden. I have ranted to a tramp. Now I rant at myself. I am sloughing the rags that have protected me. All folly!”
His searching fingers, groping to the deepest corner of a pocket, found the crumbling fragments of a dried rose. He narrowed his eyes and surveyed it as it lay in his palm, and then made as if to toss it into the pool. But he checked the gesture. He set his chin in his hands and communed aloud with himself after the fashion of those who hold aloof from mankind:
“Folly, little sister! I may as well be truthful! Two dark eyes which gave me the first honest, unafraid, and frank gaze I've had from a maid in two years, two red lips which said 'Please' and 'Thank you'! A flash of a glance behind her which called me, even if she did not mean it as a call--and so, on I fare in a lunatic's dream. Own up! I have dreamed that some day I will see her again. And down in the depths of me stirs that impulse of the male which makes the peacock spread his feathers and silly man perk in front of a mirror. Why not give in to the sense of heredity once in a while even though it means beating up a tramp and making myself more of a mark for human eyes?”
He rolled the old clothes into a bundle and stuffed them under the roots of a tree. Then he strolled away leisurely, and when he as in the wider stretches of the wood where the light was better he pulled a small book from his pocket and read as he walked.
The volume was _Sartor Resartus_. His eyes happened to find this passage and he smiled as he read:
All visible things are emblems. Hence clothes, as despicable as we think them, are so unspeakably significant. Clothes, from the King's mantle downward, are emblematic not of want only but of a manifold cunning victory over want. Men are properly said to be clothed with authority, clothed with beauty, with curses and the like. It is written, the Heavens and the Earth shall fade away like a vesture; which indeed they are: the time vesture of the Eternal. Whatsoever sensibly exists, whatsoever represents spirit to spirit, is properly a clothing, a suit of raiment, put on for a season and to be laid off. Thus in this one pregnant subject of clothes, rightly understood, is included all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and been; the whole Eternal Universe and what it holds is but clothing; and the essence of all science lies in the Philosophy of Clothes.