e a bachelor, yet she had an agreeable face and, if a soft white
collar of pleasing fashion be evidence, she put more than a scholar's
care upon her dress.

I am not entirely a novice in a library. Once I gained admittance to
the Reading Room of the British Museum--no light task even before the
war. This was the manner of it. First, I went among the policemen who
frequent the outer corridors, and inquired for a certain office which
I had been told controlled its affairs. The third policeman had heard
of it and sent me off with directions. Presently I went through an
obscure doorway, traversed a mean hall with a dirty gas-jet at the
turn and came before a wicket. A dark man with the blood of a Spanish
inquisitor asked my business. I told him I was a poor student, without
taint or heresy, who sought knowledge. He stroked his chin as though
it were a monstrous improbability. He looked me up and down, but this
might have been merely a secular inquiry on the chance that I carried
explosives. He then dipped his pen in an ancient well (it was from
such a dusty fount that the warrant for Saint Bartholomew went forth),
then bidding me be careful in my answers, he cocked his head and shut
his less suspicious eye lest it yield to mercy.

He asked my name in full, middle name and all--as though villainy
might lurk in an initial--my hotel, my length of stay in London, my
residence in America, my occupation, the titles of the books I sought.
When he had done, I offered him my age and my weakness for French
pastry, in order that material for a monograph might be at hand if at
last I came to fame, but he silenced me with his cold eye. He now
thrust a pamphlet in my hands, and told me to sit alongside and read
it. It contained the rules that govern the use of the Reading Room. It
was eight pages long, and intolerably dry, and towards the end I
nodded. Awaking with a start, I was about to hold up my hands for the
adjustment of the thumb screws--for I had fallen on a nightmare--when
he softened. The Imperial Government was now pleased to admit me to
the Reading Room for such knowledge as might lie in my capacity.

The Reading Room is used chiefly by authors, gray fellows mostly,
dried and wrinkled scholars who come here to pilfer innocently from
antiquity. Among these musty memorial shelves, if anywhere, it would
seem that the dusty padding feet of the lost digamma might be heard.
In this room, perhaps, Christian Mentzelius was at work