“Even if it was, I should be no worse off than the divine Pankhurst, a martyr to the rights of women.”

And gazing around her, she examined, with a pleased interest, the miscellaneous contents of her room. All that Amy thought least of was jettisoned here, she noticed, as if waiting her arrival to head the corner. She could not but feel sympathy and affection for the rest of this Salon des Refusés. They were mostly objects of still life. All schools seemed fairly represented, as she remembered was the case at the Tate. In one corner a dismembered bedstead and a chalky plaster cast suggested an excellent De Chirico; in another the blurred pale raspberry-pink and silver of an old suspended belt, and the tenuous mistiness of a few discarded stockings seemed newly soft from the palette of Marie Laurencin. Van Gogh, in an early period, was represented by a pair of crumpled boots, sad upon a broken cane chair; Picasso, by a shattered mandolin and a dusty soda-water syphon disposed upon a sheet of newspaper in the fireplace. A strong Camden Town influence emanated from the faded flower-patterned wallpaper and the pale indecent marble of the mantelpiece, for this room had never been redecorated by Amy. A Japanese parasol with a broken rib stood in the corner, and Emily, who had a weakness for these particular trifles, took it up, and, opening it, unconsciously stepped into the place of honor as a very charming Whistler.

After a turn or two, however, the caged bird folded this bright wing, and, betaking herself to the window, she threw up the sash and craned forth her head to stare down between the house backs, where the rank sycamores greened the yellow afternoon into the likeness of water deeps, down to the weedy gardens at the bottom, which were cheaply gay with straggled marigolds and precarious Virginia stock. An enervated subaqueous life persisted on this submerged floor. Protruding from the lush and wetly shining foliage of a thicket of Michaelmas daisies, the dark head of a cat, pressed to the ground, stared up like an angler fish at the small shoals of mud-colored birds that skimmed to and fro. Beside it, and near a summer house, battered and faded as a fragment of some sunken ship, a ghastly plaster figure hung on tiptoe, in the erect and weightless posture of a woman drowned. No anchor was to be seen, but two enormous shells lay half buried in the weeds. The stray notes of a piano, converted into something rich and strange, floated upward toward the light, bursting, as the luminous deep-sea fish do, when they reached the lesser density of the roof level.

Down the sides of the houses ran the encrusted drainpipes, soft puce or dead blue, relics, it seemed, of some abandoned dockyard undertaking. Down the side of the house, riveted firmly to the wall, circular and of six-inch, graspable diameter, ran an iron drainpipe, straight down into the deserted garden, divided on one side, by a low wall only, from the side street, and from Liberty, London, Life, Adventure, Romance. This exhilarating cup, which now flooded up like some divinely effervescent Bethesda pool, and from an ineffably low ebb, up to the very windowsill where Emily rested her chin, caused a delicious chill of excitement to run through her veins. To revisit, lonely as a cloud, in pensive but by no means vacant mood, those scenes with which she had first become acquainted in the company of Mr. Fatigay, perhaps to explore others, to get to know the great city, its highways and its fascinating byways, to scan its changing countenance, to lay fingers on its mighty pulse, to auscultate, however dimly, the eccentric beatings of its mysteriously located heart; this prospect intoxicated the chimp, and, always impulsive, she lightly flung a leg over the sill, in order to descend at once into the magic world whose troubadour voice invited her sweetly from below.

Here, however, she paused a moment. She had learned pretty thoroughly by now the one positively useful lesson which suffering and Geo. Moore have to bestow. This is, that the few pleasures of life are not to be gulped down in bumpkin haste, but savored as a rare claret should be; anticipation, like the voluptuously inhaled bouquet, being the best part, and to be long lingered over, providing only that one has the cup very surely in one’s hand. The chimp accordingly flung herself down upon her wretched pallet, and passed the long hours until Amy’s return in a most agreeable reverie, stewing gently in the languorous garret heat and happily staring at a low and tawny ceiling, now cinematographically frescoed with images of the adventures which lay before her.

It was therefore not until the next afternoon that she uttered the inspiriting lines which have been mentioned, and she did so as she thrust over the sill a foot, resplendent in one of those very crumpled boots which Amy had discarded, and forthwith she embarked upon the descent with a confidence born of her arboreal youth and of the fact that she had prudently borrowed an old pair of Amy’s gym bloomers. A moment later, she was over the wall, and stood upon the gritty sidewalk, beneath the caterpillar-eaten limes. Putting up the parasol, which she had brought down gripped in her teeth, she strolled through the gold siesta of stucco and wisteria, moving with almost the bodiless freedom of a dream, except for the occasional pinches by which Amy’s shoes obligingly reminded her that she was awake.

Emerging upon Adelaide Road, she took on a brisker step, and, passing swiftly through the loud and broken streets, she arrived at the spot which, she had decided, must certainly be the object of her first pilgrimage in the great city. To most of her sex this would have been Bond Street or the most super of all cinemas, but Emily, though feminine, was not a woman, and even at the risk of being thought a bluestocking, she gave the British Museum precedence over modes and movies. She had observed, while dusting Amy’s writing desk one day, a ticket for the Reading Room lying neglected in a pigeonhole, and since Amy had sternly forbidden what she chose to call ‘monkey-tricks’ with her own books, the chimp felt justified in borrowing this ticket in the interests of that intellectual urge which it is everyone’s duty to forward by all the means in their power.

Emily was not entirely a stranger to the Museum. Mr. Fatigay had taken her there one afternoon, and had even penetrated with her as far as the inner door of the Reading Room, to indulge her with a glimpse of that vast hive, and the swarm of busy creatures engaged in manufacturing a further and diluted yield out of the very honey that gorged its cellular lining. Into this hive, tingling with the apprehensions of an alien wasp, come to contribute nothing, but to carry away all she could, Emily now entered, and, timidly taking a seat, she glanced about under her dark lashes to study the procedure of the habitués.

It was not long before her keen and analytical intelligence had grasped the connection between the consultation of a catalogue, the filling up of an application form, and the subsequent arrival of books. Marking her place with the bright parasol, which, she now realized with unerring judgment, seemed a little too smart and Ascotish for her austere surroundings, where, it appeared, all such sumptuary blossoms had been rigidly nipped in the bud, in order to produce a richer crop of beards and horn-rimmed spectacles, Emily trotted up to where the catalogues were shelved, and, having hoisted DA-DEB onto the shelf, she stood upon tiptoe to peep at it, in search of Darwin’s Origin of Species, for she was a great believer in beginning at the beginning.