Reponder

In a far more dramatic and meaningful dream sequence (the didactic tone of the first dream sequence has been earlier commented upon), he sees again, now strangely indifferent if not actively hostile, the many lovely girls who have departed from the world, and he reponders their fate and the fate of those girls still alive in the light of the verses and emblems which he had found merely puzzling on his first visit to the region.

What had twice been pondered then put aside is now repondered and acted upon.

The lucidity of hindsight, on the other hand, tells him, when he reponders all of these events some time later, that it was while he was sitting alone in the Topples Auditorium that the details surrounding his brother's disappearance first floated irretrievably into unreality.

First he pondered and repondered his poem for sixteen years after the first edition; never a day passed in this whole time that he was not about this, both with pen and with reflection.