"'I see,' I said. 'Well, good-night and thank you.'

"'Good-night,' he said nervously. 'Excuse me if I don't go down with
you. I am rather busy.'

"'Literary work, I presume?' I said politely, and he nodded.

"'Yes,' he replied. 'I'm engaged on the Book of the Dead. I go to Egypt
every year--next month, in fact--and I am behind in my notes.'

"I stood with my hand on the door, looking across the great chamber, and
saw him hastily picking up the threads my intrusion had broken. All
around the vague walls stood the painted mummy-cases of the dead, like
sentinels, watching him with their brilliant, unwinking, expectant eyes.
On a shelf close to me stood cats in dissipated attitudes, mere yellow
bundles of swathings and fustiness. On trestles behind the door was a
long packing case containing a slender shape. There was no casing here,
no painted visage, only a vague impression. The sharp frontal bones had
shorn clean through the rotted fabrics and I could see the snarling
teeth. The small head seemed thrown back, the eyes closed, in enjoyment
of some frightful joke. I looked back again and saw him writing, his
head in his left hand, writing, no doubt, something in the Book of the
Dead.

"Curious, wasn't it? Curious, I mean, the sort of people who had crossed
one another's paths at the moment of my girl's coming so forlornly into
the world? I was taken with the grimness of it. I was obsessed with the
Book of the Dead. It seemed to me shocking that a man, cultivated,
well-to-do apparently, with good health into the bargain, should be
absorbed in so crazy a hobby. And the English woman, the honourable
creature whose temperament unfitted her to take any interest in an
orphan whose mother had died in her service and whose father had
perished on the field of battle. Impossible, say you. It isn't at all
impossible. Rich people--I mean the rich who are forever rushing about
the world or hiding in Mediterranean villas or in yachts on the
Dalmatian coast--are very curious people. The very nature of their mode
of existence makes them monsters of selfishness. They are the logical
outcome of our predatory social system. They are like the insects which
we are told will some day triumph over other forms of life. At least, I
think of them as such when I encounter them rushing thither and yon over
the face of the earth, crawling up mountains and flying through the air,
their shiny wing-cases flashing in the sun and the sound of their