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looked like wet granite. At intervals upon it naked skulls, like the trophies of cavemen, thrust up branching antlers or simple horns. Stray visitors from the provinces, peering uncertain through the heavy doors, felt that a Natural History Museum ought to be brighter. Only the specialist eye of a British club-man—and Louisa’s—at once recognized the entirely appropriate threshold to the most expensive flats in London, single gentlemen only.
    When one rang for the lift, nothing happened.—This was all right with Louisa, who had arrived a trifle early; in any case, she would no more have minded waiting than a scholar minds waiting in a library, or a botanist in a herbarium, or a kindergarten mistress in a show of infant handicraft. She had all the heads to look at. The legend beneath an Oryx indiensis , “Shot by Major Cart-wright-Jones, Himalayas 1885,” filled her with vicarious pleasure. (Though fond of animals, she was fonder still of majors, and besides had never seen an oryx on the hoof like a major in his boots.) A Colonel Hamlyn had bagged a wildebeeste, the Hon. C. P. Coe a moose; Louisa mentally tramped veldts with the one, slogged through tundra with the other—she was having, so to speak, a last orgy—and marveled as always at men’s gratuitous heroism …
    F. Pennon didn’t appear to have shot anything. Even so, Louisa could well imagine some future nostalgia on his part, and easily promised herself to respect it.
    An ancient clock coughed the half-hour. She rang again, and now in the lift shaft something happened. Iron vitals rumbled; machinery shuddered, ropes strained, wheels ground; it was like the birth of the Industrial Age. Rudimentary yet effectual, a great iron cage descended, groaned to a halt, and gaped. Casting a last affectionate thought towards Colonel Hamlyn, Major Jones and Mr.Coe—whom no one else had thought of, let alone with affection, since about 1910—Louisa stepped hardily in.
    â€œF. Pennon, third,” said Louisa. “What a splendid lot of heads!”
    â€œThe relatives don’t claim ’em,” replied the lift man morosely.
    His aged features, unused to expressing anything but apathy, readjusted themselves to express a dislike of small talk. Louisa admitted her error, recognized, and applauded, a complete absorption in the remarkable task of making six hundredweight of iron go up and down, and held her tongue.
    Up they labored. An eye attuned to the cavern below instinctively sought, between the probably hand-forged bars, for some daubing of elk or mastodon on the lift shaft’s naked brick. But it was bare as a pothole.—To be ejected, at the Third, into civilization, nonetheless came as a shock, even though one was still, unmistakably, in Gladstone Mansions as well. The long narrow corridor still gave the impression of being underground, if only as in a mine; upon the walls, instead of horns and skulls, hung steel engravings—but each commemorating some disaster to British arms. ( The Charge of the Light Brigade , the Loss of the Royal George , the Retreat from Corunna .) Louisa passed appreciatively between them, identified the door she sought, and used the Death of Nelson as a mirror to repowder her nose.
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    â€œF. Pennon?” inquired Louisa.
    â€œMiss Datchett?” inquired the old manservant.
    He might have been the lift man’s twin brother; but Louisa was now too intent on her own affairs even to ask if they were related.—Behind him stretched a typical Gladstone Mansions sitting room—furnished apparently with sarcophagi, carpeted apparently with churchyard moss, the whole gloomy vista closed by curtains not absolutely black, but nonetheless suggestive of a first-class French funeral. The only points of brightness were the silver tea set ready on the tea table and the eager gleam in F. Pennon’s eye as he hurried towards her out of the circumambiant gloom.
    Louisa scrutinized