... equal swiftness, it passed. His present surroundings came back. He dropped with a dizzy rush from awful spaces ... and was aware that he was merely—standing on the black, woolly mat before the fire watching the movements of his new employer, that his pumps were bright and pointed, his head just level with a dark marble mantelpiece. Dazed, and a trifle breathless he felt; and at the back of his disordered mind stirred a schoolboy's memory that the Pythagoreans believed the ... — The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood