I

sunburnt summer-scented, country-smelling clothes, the fresh beginning in her room, one visit to an A.B.C. and the British Museum and everything would be dead again. No change at Tansley Street; through the crack in the dining-room door Mr. Rodkin and his newspapers, Mr. Gunner sitting over the empty grate waiting for nothing; Mrs. Mann standing on the hearthrug, waiting to explain away something, watching Sissie and Mrs. Bailey clear the table, with a smile fixed on her large well-made child’s face, Mr. Keppel coming out of the room with his graceful halting lounge and going on, unseeing, upstairs, upright in his shabby dreamy grey clothes as if he were walking on level ground. Lingering a moment too long, Mrs. Bailey in the hall, her excited conspirator’s smiles as she communicated the news of Mr. Rodkin’s friend and the lessons, as if nothing were changed and one were still always available for association with the house; her smiling calculating dismay at the refusal, her appeal to Mr. Rodkin, his abstracted stiff-jointed emergence into the hall with his newspaper, his brilliant-eyed, dried-up laugh, his chuckling assertion, like a lawyer, that he had promised the lessons and Shatov must not be disappointed; the suspicion that Mrs. Bailey was passing the moments in fear of losing a well-to-do newcomer, an important person brought in by her only good boarder; the wretched sense of being caught and linked up again in the shifts and deceptions of the bankrupt house; the uselessness; the certainty that the new man, as described, would be retained only by his temporary ignorance and helplessness, the vexatious thought of him, waiting upstairs in the drawing-room in a state of groundlessly aroused interest and anticipation, Mr. Rodkin’s irresponsible admiring spectator’s confidence as he made the introductions and vanished whilst the little dark frock-coated figure standing alone in the cold gaslight of the fireless room was still in the attitude of courteous obeisance; the happy ease of explaining to the controlledly waiting figure the impossibility of giving lessons on one’s own language without the qualification of study; his lifted head, the extraordinary gentleness of the