ish muleteers, with their convoy--Drake's booty,
gold and silver. But to return----

To what, to where? She opened the door, and, putting her umbrella in the
stand--that goes without saying; so, too, the whiff of beef from the
basement; dot, dot, dot. But what I cannot thus eliminate, what I must,
head down, eyes shut, with the courage of a battalion and the blindness
of a bull, charge and disperse are, indubitably, the figures behind the
ferns, commercial travellers. There I've hidden them all this time in
the hope that somehow they'd disappear, or better still emerge, as
indeed they must, if the story's to go on gathering richness and
rotundity, destiny and tragedy, as stories should, rolling along with it
two, if not three, commercial travellers and a whole grove of
aspidistra. "The fronds of the aspidistra only partly concealed the
commercial traveller--" Rhododendrons would conceal him utterly, and
into the bargain give me my fling of red and white, for which I starve
and strive; but rhododendrons in Eastbourne--in December--on the
Marshes' table--no, no, I dare not; it's all a matter of crusts and
cruets, frills and ferns. Perhaps there'll be a moment later by the sea.
Moreover, I feel, pleasantly pricking through the green fretwork and
over the glacis of cut glass, a desire to peer and peep at the man
opposite--one's as much as I can manage. James Moggridge is it, whom the
Marshes call Jimmy? [Minnie, you must promise not to twitch till I've
got this straight]. James Moggridge travels in--shall we say
buttons?--but the time's not come for bringing _them_ in--the big and
the little on the long cards, some peacock-eyed, others dull gold;
cairngorms some, and others coral sprays--but I say the time's not come.
He travels, and on Thursdays, his Eastbourne day, takes his meals with
the Marshes. His red face, his little steady eyes--by no means
altogether commonplace--his enormous appetite (that's safe; he won't
look at Minnie till the bread's swamped the gravy dry), napkin tucked
diamond-wise--but this is primitive, and, whatever it may do the reader,
don't take me in. Let's dodge to the Moggridge household, set that in
motion. Well, the family boots are mended on Sundays by James himself.
He reads _Truth_. But his passion? Roses--and his wife a retired
hospital nurse--interesting--for God's sake let me have one woman with a
name I like! But no; she's of the unborn children of the mind, illicit,
none the less loved, l