Margareena and Caseous

The relation between Margareena and Caseous is one strand in a deliberately unstable triangle of love and rivalry. Margareena is said to be fond of Caseous while also loving Burrus, and her entanglement with an elusive Antonius complicates the contest further. Rather than resolving into a conventional romance, the attachment becomes a shifting comic arrangement whose terms are continually multiplied and rephrased.

A love triangle in motion

The episode first introduces Margareena as a woman who appears after the narrator describes the need for a female figure between two male poles. Her arrival is marked as a new beginning, an “absolute zero” or “babbling pumpt,” and she is named as the figure the preceding account had been waiting to meet. This framing makes her not merely an object of an existing rivalry but the point around which its relationships reorganize.

The account then gives her a period of “pure lyricism,” expressed in songs of longing and hope. One song presents desire as a plea addressed to Sweet Margareen; another imagines a remaining “lump of gold.” The narrator assigns the first piece to Caseous and describes Burrus’s contribution as a toast, distinguishing their expressions without turning either into a definitive claim on Margareena.

Caseous, Burrus, and Antonius

The clearest statement of Margareena’s attachments is also deliberately contradictory: she is “very fond of Burrus” and “velly fond of chee.” The phrasing associates her with both Burrus and Caseous, while the surrounding passage identifies the two as contenders for her. Her affection for Caseous therefore exists alongside, not in place of, her attachment to Burrus.

The rivalry becomes still less stable when Margareena implicates herself with Antonius, described as elusive and as having a personal interest in refined cheeses. The narrator gathers Antonius, Burrus, and Caseous into a “grouptriad,” turning a two-man contest into a three-way configuration. The shifting arrangement is conveyed through comic, pseudo-technical language of equivalence and proportion: desire is not a settled pairing but a relation whose participants and terms keep changing.

Form and unresolved outcome

The relation is mediated by a narrator who treats love as lyric material, food imagery, and mock chemical analysis. Songs, toast, cheese, and the language of polarity mingle, so that the emotional arrangement is repeatedly translated into other systems rather than explained in realist terms. This verbal play does not erase the basic distinction the passage establishes: Margareena is attached to Caseous while remaining involved with Burrus, and Antonius further complicates their contest.

No choice, union, or final separation is reported in these passages. The relation’s significance lies instead in its unsettled structure: Margareena’s divided affections and Antonius’s addition prevent the rivalry from closing into a simple pair. The narrative leaves the attachment in circulation, as one element of a larger contest whose comic language keeps multiplying its possible correspondences.