he calls it,
last night, and even he says this morning it wasn't worth it. But let's
read on."

Again he read, with unresilient movement:

"_I saw Osirian Egypt kneel adown
Before the vine wreath crown!
I saw parched Abyssinia rouse and sing
To the silver cymbals' ring!
I saw the whelming vintage hotly pierce
Old Tartary the fierce!
Great Brahma from his mystic heaven groans_ ..."

"Hm! He was a Buddhist god, Brahma was; mythology again. As I say, if you
take it seriously, it's just glorifying intoxication.--But I say; I can
hardly see. Better light the lamp. We'll have tea first, then read. No,
you sit still; I'll get it ready; I know where things are--"

He rose, crossed to a little cupboard with a sink in it, filled the
kettle at the tap, and brought it to the fire. Then he struck a match and
lighted the lamp.

The cheap glass shade was of a foolish corolla shape, clear glass below,
shading to pink, and deepening to red at the crimped edge. It gave a
false warmth to the spaces of the room above the level of the
mantelpiece, and Ed's figure, as he turned the regulator, looked from the
waist upwards as if he stood within that portion of a spectrum screen
that deepens to the band of red. The bright concentric circles that
spread in rings of red on the ceiling were more dimly reduplicated in the
old mirror over the mantelpiece; and the wintry eastern light beyond the
chimney-hoods seemed suddenly almost to die out.

Bessie, her white neck below the level of the lamp-shade, had taken up
the book again; but she was not reading. She was looking over it at the
upper part of the grate. Presently she spoke. "I was looking at some of
those things this afternoon, at the Museum."

He was clearing from the table more buckram linings and patterns of
paper, numbers of Myra's Journal and The Delineator. Already on his way
to the cupboard he had put aside a red-bodiced dressmaker's "shape" of
wood and wire. "What things?" he asked.

"Those you were reading about. Greek, aren't they?"

"Oh, the Greek room!... But those people, Bacchus and those, weren't
people in the ordinary sense. Gods and goddesses, most of 'em; Bacchus
was a god. That's what mythology means. I wish sometimes our course took
in Greek literature, but it's a dead language after all. German's more
good in modern life. It would be nice to know everything, but one has to
select, you know. Hallo, I clean forgot; I brought you some grapes,
Bessie; here