.’ ” And, lost in the sweet reverie, he smirked and bowed upon the empty air.

At that moment, Emily chanced to look behind her, and received all the impact of the quivering blandness which her pursuer was bestowing upon her image.

“Good heavens!” she thought. “Is it possible? Am I loved by D.17?”

The idea was distasteful to her. While she saw no reason to doubt his moral integrity, and felt, indeed, a deep gratitude for the honor he bestowed upon her, she knew only too well that she could offer nothing in return but a sincere friendship and a lasting esteem, and there was that in the way he had held one hand to his heart when she glanced at him which suggested he would find such a response worse than nothing. Besides, her present situation was altogether too ambiguous, too unconventional. So the chimp bowed her head and hurried on.

“Did she see me?” he thought. “Provocatively thus to fly? Ah! The witch!” And, quickening his pace, he followed her up Haverstock Hill.

Emily, already late, had no time to make a detour in the hope of giving him the slip. When they reached the quiet turning beside Amy’s house, she took a hurried glance about her, and, seeing no one but her impassioned follower, she made a sudden leap at the wall and was over in the twinkling of an eye.

“Oh!” cried the astonished man, and he stood rooted to the spot.

“Oh!” he cried again, for the dainty figure had come once more into view, nimbly ascending the drainpipe which led to her high attic window.

The poor fellow could scarcely believe his eyes. His dream was shattered before it had well begun. To think that one so modest, so prim, almost, to the outward eye, should be such an arrant little tomboy in reality! Biting his lip in deep vexation, he hurried down the hill, cursing himself under his breath for having been an infatuated fool. On the bus top, in his hasty retreat to recover his work, there spasmodically burst from him at every few hundred yards: “. . . modern women! These modern women!”

Now this incident, which was not without its whimsical side (and, indeed, in later life Emily would frequently shake her head smilingly at the recollection of it), this incident was something of a calamity at the time it occurred, and for a good reason: that Emily now felt that it would be too embarrassing and perhaps too dangerous to return to the British Museum. Even if she could have borne the proximity of one puzzled and outraged consciousness, and the possibility of gossip and curious glances from all sides, she dared not incur even a remote risk of some further pursuit or other complication which might result in her exposure to Amy. Reproach, humiliation, mockery, corporal punishment perhaps, and certainly a very strict confinement in future, would follow. And, although a glimpse she had caught of her pursuer’s face during her ascent of the drainpipe gave her grounds to hope that his passion was already much abated, she knew from her own cruel experience that, even supposing love to have been wiped out completely by some incident or revelation, it was more than probable that, at the next concurrence of the elements which had produced it, it would be produced again.

She felt, therefore, that it would be better for all concerned if she went no more to the Reading Room, and since the decision, like all thus qualified, was a painful one, she could not entirely banish a rather gloomy expression that evening.

“Emily seems to be frowning rather,” said Mr. Fatigay, who was dining there that night. “I wonder if London strains her eyes at all. Perhaps she should wear glasses.”

“What nonsense, Alfred!” said Amy.

Chapter 10

I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known.

“Tennyson, Ulysses,” Emily thought; and though as a matter of fact she had not yet seen as much as she wished of the city, she felt now that she had too embarrassing a knowledge of the hearts of men to permit of her mingling easily with the general crowd. Besides her experience of yesterday, she had frequently heard Amy recite to Mr. Fatigay detailed accounts of languishing glances or even ardent approaches inflicted on her by complete strangers, sometimes of military or artistic appearance, in the thoroughfares of the town. She had concluded, moreover, from his reception of these accounts, that he resented extremely those happenings to one whom he loved, whereupon she thought to herself, “It is a duty to avoid them, also, on the part of one who loves him.”

It happened, therefore, that after a busy morning of sweeping and scrubbing, during which she had had no time to take thought, she effected her escape from confinement, and stood upon the sidewalk with no definite notion of where she should go. The hot walls, the hard stones, and the sharp-edged dust roused by their unfriendliness a keen nostalgia in her, and as a parrot screeched from a foody basement nearby, the poor exile closed her eyes and shudderingly inhaled a sharp whiff of her longing for her native land. For a moment she felt herself dispread in shafted twilight in the still heart of some great tree, sprawling on her back along a monstrous bough, with one sunspot, perhaps, making a jewel of the green plush lichen an inch from her pensive cheek. From a drooping hand half an overripe fruit might fall away, splashing in luscious purple another branch forty feet below, along which a tiny pink and silver monkey would scuttle to seize upon it.

What if, her body thus peacefully reclined, her heart within, straining like some overworked engine, pumped out sorrow equally with blood? There, at least, that sorrow, sprouting from her bosom like a rank and cancerous orchid, would unfurl its deadly beauty unhindered and in quiet. Here, her grief, even, was debased and stunted under a petty oppression, frayed by the sharp meaningless detail of an alien world, brought down from tragedy into shapeless misery by her own thwarted attempts at intellectual development.

“And how,” she thought, “am I helping my dear Mr. Fatigay by holding myself an anguished spectator of his decay? Would I have not done better to have remained cloistered in some vaulted grove, weeding all thoughts not of him from his green grave in my breast? Creeping out sometimes, perhaps, to follow, softly as the great moth, ghostly as the white bloom, the leafmold track to the clearing’s edge, whence, looking to the lighted veranda, where his strange successor sat with bottle and magazine and bright lamp whereunder the shattered beetles died, I should see, as it were, the opening of the path along which he had gone, leaving no trace on that gateway hardness, but only, in the deep jungle outside, his divine footprint eternal on the desert earth of my heart.”

It was not natural to the poor chimp to long for a life of sterile sorrow; the usual trend of her thoughts when her position seemed more than usually hopeless lay rather towards a career of nursing, or some similar selfless benevolence, but this afternoon she was more than ordinarily dispirited.

“She’s no use to me,” Amy had said, later in the overnight conversation which had followed on Mr. Fatigay expressing anxiety about her eyes.

“I must declare,” she had continued petulantly, “that, little as I like the two hobbledehoys you introduced as friends of yours, whose idea of mannerly behavior seemed to be to brush aside every conversational opening I gave them, in order to chew to death their revolting reminiscences of what you were before I knew you, little as I liked them . . .”

“But hang it all, Amy,” Mr.