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When she came to the realization, Imogen, starting back, indignant through all her being, promised herself that if he looked down she, at all events, would never lend herself to the preposterous topsy-turvydom by looking up. She would firmly ignore that shift of focus. She would look straight before her; she would look, as she spoke, the truth. She "followed her gleam."
To sit in the stalls and watch the incredible jumble-show, the reason-defying topsy-turvydom of it, the gorgeous, squalid, tearful, and mirthful pageantry, the reckless inconsequences, the flagrant impossibilities; to watch the Devil ramping up and down like a hungry lion, and to hear the young-eyed cherubim choiring from the skies: what better entertainment could the heart of man desire?"
The matchless topsy-turvydom which has marked the passage of the last ten years, the tremendously accelerated velocity with which labour is moving towards emancipation from all control, have so confused things in general that an observer must stand back and get a new focus before he can allow his mind to dwell on the things that he sees.
But innovations which tend to bring about a kind of social topsy-turvydom, ought only to be undertaken by general consent. Let the innovators have patience.
The best and last touch to this topsy-turvydom was given when a lady, observing one of these reverend gentlemen who for some reason did not carry this curious coiffure, exclaimed, in a tone of heartrending surprise and distress, "Oh, he's bobbed his hair!" Here again of course even a superficial glance at the pageant of the street should not be content with its comedy.
That a political boss in this or in that district, should dictate who should and who should not, be employed in the street-cleaning department, even down to the meanest remover of dung with a dust-pan, as was done for years in New York and every other city in America, would be looked upon here as a farce of Topsy-Turvydom, with Alice in Wonderland in the title-rôle.
To this end he quitted Sheringham on the day after Crispin's departure. Not a little perplexed was Cynthia at the topsy-turvydom in which that morning she had found her father's house. Kenneth was gone; he had left in the dead of night, and seemingly in haste and suddenness, since on the previous evening there had been no talk of his departing.
For these two men on the tower were left alone with the most terrible aspect of Gothic; the monstrous foreshortening and disproportion, the dizzy perspectives, the glimpses of great things small and small things great; a topsy-turvydom of stone in the mid-air. Details of stone, enormous by their proximity, were relieved against a pattern of fields and farms, pygmy in their distance.
But she was too busy to pay much attention to him; she had no time to waste; moreover, her ten years' campaign in kitchen and nursery had taught her self-control. He felt more sentimental than he cared to show, and the topsy-turvydom of the room made him fidgety.
What is quite certain is that, whoever killed it, 'Patience' embalmed it in odours and spices of the most fragrant and costly description, so that it has remained a thing of beauty even to our own day. In 'Iolanthe' Mr. Gilbert reached the dizziest height of topsy-turvydom to which he ever climbed, and set Sullivan to solve what was perhaps the most difficult problem of his whole career.
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