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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