So she was still in the old neighborhood, near
Bedford Square. The new number probably meant increased prosperity. He
hoped so. He would like to know that she was snugly settled. He looked
at his watch. It was a quarter past ten; she would not be home for a
good two hours yet, and he might as well walk over and have a look at
the place. He remembered the shortest way.
It was a warm, smoky evening, and there was a grimy moon. He went
through Covent Garden to Oxford Street, and as he turned into Museum
Street he walked more slowly, smiling at his own nervousness as he
approached the sullen gray mass at the end. He had not been inside the
Museum, actually, since he and Hilda used to meet there; sometimes
to set out for gay adventures at Twickenham or Richmond, sometimes to
linger about the place for a while and to ponder by Lord Elgin's marbles
upon the lastingness of some things, or, in the mummy room, upon the
awful brevity of others. Since then Bartley had always thought of the
British Museum as the ultimate repository of mortality, where all the
dead things in the world were assembled to make one's hour of youth
the more precious. One trembled lest before he got out it might somehow
escape him, lest he might drop the glass from over-eagerness and see it
shivered on the stone floor at his feet. How one hid his youth under his
coat and hugged it! And how good it was to turn one's back upon all that
vaulted cold, to take Hilda's arm and hurry out of the great door and
down the steps into the sunlight among the pigeons--to know that
the warm and vital thing within him was still there and had not been
snatched away to flush Caesar's lean cheek or to feed the veins of some
bearded Assyrian king.
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