He changed the posture of his legs fifty times.

For a while he wrestled right gallantly with the apparent menace of the Fates that he was to get no dinner at all that day; it seemed incredibly derisive, for, as I must repeat, it had never happened to him by any accident before.

"You are born--you dine." Such appeared to him to be the positive regulation of affairs, and a most proper one,--of the matters of course following the birth of a young being.
By what frightful mischance, then, does he miss his dinner?
By placing the smallest confidence in the gentlemanly feeling of another man! Algernon deduced this reply accurately from his own experience, and whether it can be said by other "undined" mortals, does not matter in the least.

But we have nothing to do with the constitutionally luckless: the calamitous history of a simple empty stomach is enough.

Here the tragedy is palpable.