concrete
promenade, which will be of exactly the same dimensions whether you race
or crawl across it, coated with stale, unvarying scents and surrounded
with cries and noises that have ceased to have the least meaning or
interest. As a substitute for a narrow cage the new enclosures are
excellent, but I should think they are a poor imitation of a life of
liberty."

"It's rather depressing to think that," said Mrs. Gurtleberry; "they look
so spacious and so natural, but I suppose a good deal of what seems
natural to us would be meaningless to a wild animal."

"That is where our superior powers of self-deception come in," said the
niece; "we are able to live our unreal, stupid little lives on our
particular Mappin terrace, and persuade ourselves that we really are
untrammelled men and women leading a reasonable existence in a reasonable
sphere."

"But good gracious," exclaimed the aunt, bouncing into an attitude of
scandalised defence, "we are leading reasonable existences! What on
earth do you mean by trammels? We are merely trammelled by the ordinary
decent conventions of civilised society."

"We are trammelled," said the niece, calmly and pitilessly, "by
restrictions of income and opportunity, and above all by lack of
initiative. To some people a restricted income doesn't matter a bit, in
fact it often seems to help as a means for getting a lot of reality out
of life; I am sure there are men and women who do their shopping in
little back streets of Paris, buying four carrots and a shred of beef for
their daily sustenance, who lead a perfectly real and eventful existence.
Lack of initiative is the thing that really cripples one, and that is
where you and I and Uncle James are so hopelessly shut in. We are just
so many animals stuck down on a Mappin terrace, with this difference in
our disfavour, that the animals are there to be looked at, while nobody
wants to look at us. As a matter of fact there would be nothing to look
at. We get colds in winter and hay fever in summer, and if a wasp
happens to sting one of us, well, that is the wasp's initiative, not
ours; all we do is to wait for the swelling to go down. Whenever we do
climb into local fame and notice, it is by indirect methods; if it
happens to be a good flowering year for magnolias the neighbourhood
observes: 'Have you seen the Gurtleberry's magnolia? It is a perfect
mass of flowers,' and we go about telling people that there are fifty-
seven bloss