d calmly,
watching his work with her round cleft chin in the shell
of her hand. "That's not bad, you know. That nearest girl
sitting on the grass is almost felt. But if you show it
to the English they will be so shocked that they will
use lorgnettes to hide their confusion. Ah!" she said,
jumping down, "here am I wasting myself upon you, with
a carriage _a l'heure!_ You are not worth it," and she
went. After that it seemed to Kendal that he did not miss
Elfrida so much. Certainly it never occurred to him to
hasten his departure by a day on her account, and there
came a morning when he drove through Bloomsbury and
realized that he had not thought about her for a fortnight.
The British Museum suggested her to him there--the British
Museum, and the certainty that within its massive walls
a number of unimaginative young women in collarless
sage-green gowns were copying casts of antique sculptures
at that moment. But he did not allow himself to suppose
that she could possibly be among them.

He sniffed London all day with a home-returning satisfaction
in her solidity and her ugliness and her low-toned fogs
and her great throbbing unostentatious importance, which
the more flippant capital seemed to have intensified in
him. He ordered the most British luncheon he could think
of, and reflected upon the superiority of the beer. He
read the leaders in the _Standard_ through to the bitter
end, and congratulated himself and the newspaper that
there was no rag of an absurd _feuilleton_ to distract
his attention from the importance of the news of the day.
He remembered all sorts of acquaintances that Paris had
foamed over for months; his heart warmed to a certain
whimsical old couple who lived in Park Street and went
out to walk every morning after breakfast with their
poodle. He felt disposed to make a formal call upon them
and inquire after the poodle. It was--perhaps with an
unconscious desire to make rather more of the idyl of
his homecoming that he went to see the Cardiffs instead,
who were his very old friends, and lived in Kensington
Square.

As he turned out of Kensington High Street into a shoppy
little thoroughfare, and through it to this quiet,
neglected high-nosed old locality, he realized with an
added satisfaction that he had come back to Thackeray's
London. One was apt, he reflected, with a charity which
he would not have allowed himself always, to undervalue
Thackeray in these days. After all, he once expres