it a barber and learn how to control his hair. He obeyed, and returned
with his shock parted in the middle and plastered down heavily with
pomatum, a saint of more than methodistical meekness. On Zora declaring
that he looked awful (he was indeed inconceivably hideous), and that she
preferred Struwel Peter after all, he dutifully washed his head with soda
(after grave consultation with the chambermaid), and sunned himself once
more in the smiles of his mistress.

Now and then, however, as she was kind and not tyrannical, she felt a
pin-prick of compunction.

"If you would rather do anything else, don't hesitate to say so."

But Septimus, after having contemplated the world's potentialities of
action with lack-luster eye, would declare that there was nothing else that
could be done. Then she could rate him soundly.

"If I proposed that we should sail up the Andes and eat fried moonbeams,
you would say 'yes.' Why haven't you more initiative?"

"I'm like Mrs. Shandy," he replied. "Some people are born so. They are
quiescent; other people can jump about like grasshoppers. Do you know
grasshoppers are very interesting?" And he began to talk irrelevantly on
insects.

Their intercourse encouraged confidential autobiography. Zora learned the
whole of his barren history. Fatherless, motherless, brotherless, he was
alone in the world. From his father, Sir Erasmus Dix, a well-known
engineer, to whose early repression much of Septimus's timidity was due, he
had inherited a modest fortune. After leaving Cambridge he had wandered
aimlessly about Europe. Now he lived in a little house in Shepherd's Bush,
with a studio or shed at the end of the garden which he used as a
laboratory.

"Why Shepherd's Bush?" asked Zora.

"Wiggleswick likes it," said he.

"And now he has the whole house to himself? I suppose he makes himself
comfortable in your quarters and drinks your wine and smokes your cigars
with his friends. Did you lock things up?"

"Oh, yes, of course," said Septimus.

"And where are the keys?"

"Why Wiggleswick has them," he replied.

Zora drew in her breath. "You don't know how angry you make me. If ever I
meet Wiggleswick--"

"Well?"

"I'll talk to him," said Zora with a fine air of menace.

She, on her side, gave him such of her confidences as were meet for
masculine ears. Naturally she impressed upon him the fact that his sex was
abhorrent to her in all its physical, moral, and spiritual manifestations.
Se