oks on bookshelves; middle plane, the upper
halves of two women dressed in tight black; front plane, a counter,
dotted with glasses, and having strange areas of zinc. Reckon all that
as the stage, and the rest of the room as auditorium. But the stage of
a private bar is more mysterious than the stage of a theatre. You are
closer to it, and yet it is far less approachable. The edge of the
counter is more sacred than the footlights. Impossible to imagine
yourself leaping over it. Impossible to imagine yourself in that
cloistered place behind it. Impossible to imagine how the priestesses
got themselves into that place, or that they ever leave it. They are
always there; they are always the same. You may go into a theatre when
it is empty and dark; but did you ever go into a private bar that was
empty and dark? A private bar is as eternal as the hills, as changeless
as the monomania of a madman, as mysterious as sorcery. Always the same
order of bottles, the same tinkling, the same popping, the same
time-tables, and the same realistic pictures of frothing champagne on
the walls, the same advertisements on the same ash-trays on the
counter, the same odour that wipes your face like a towel the instant
you enter; and the same smiles, the same gestures, the same black
fabric stretched to tension over the same impressive mammiferous
phenomena of the same inexplicable creatures who apparently never eat
and never sleep, imprisoned for life in the hallowed and mystic hollow
between the bottles and the zinc.

In a tone almost inaudible in its discretion, Mr Brindley let fall to
me as he went in--

This is she.'

She was not quite the ordinary barmaid. Nor, as I learnt afterwards,
was she considered to be the ordinary barmaid. She was something midway
in importance between the wife of the new proprietor and the younger
woman who stood beside her in the cloister talking to a being that
resembled a commercial traveller. It was the younger woman who was the
ordinary barmaid; she had bright hair, and the bright vacant stupidity
which, in my narrow experience, barmaids so often catch like an
infectious disease from their clients. But Annie Brett was different. I
can best explain how she impressed me by saying that she had the mien
of a handsome married woman of forty with a coquettish and
superficially emotional past, but also with a daughter who is just
going into long skirts. I have known one or two such women. They have
been beautif