“Yes,” he answered, “it is dirty and foggy, and the buildings along the banks of it are sometimes old and in pieces. But everyone that has known it will tell you the same. Then I went to a pantomime with my nurse.”
“Oh! I know what a pantomime is,” she said. “Miss Minns once saw one, but there was a man with a red nose and she didn’t like it. Only there were fairies as well, and if I’d been there I should only have seen the fairies.”
“Well, this was ‘Dick Whittington.’ There was a glorious cat. I don’t remember about the rest; but I went home in a golden dream and for the next month I thought of nothing else. London became for me a dark place with one glorious circle of light in the midst of it!”
“Oh! It must have been beautiful!” she sighed.
“Then,” he went on, “it spread from that, you know, to other things, and I went to school. For a time everything was swallowed up in that, beating other people, coming out top, and getting licked for slacking. London was fun for the holidays, but it wasn’t a bit the important thing. I was like that until I was seventeen.”
“You were very lucky,” Janet said, “to go to school. I asked father once, but he was very angry; and, you know, he is away for months and months sometimes, and then it is most dreadfully lonely. I have never had anyone at all to talk to until you came, and now they’ll take you away in a moment, so do hurry up. There simply isn’t a minute!”
Miss Minns was heard to say:
“Aren’t you cold by the window, Janet? I think you’d better come nearer the table.”
“Oh! please don’t interrupt, Miss Minns!” She waved her hand. “It’s as warm as toast, really. Now please go on, it’s a most terribly exciting adventure.”
“Well,” he said, sinking his voice and speaking in a dramatic whisper, “the next part of the tremendous adventure was books and things. I suddenly, you know, discovered what they were. I’d read things before, of course, but it had always been to fill in time while I was waiting for something else, and now I suddenly saw them differently, in rows and rows and rows, each with a secret in it like a nut, and I cracked them and ate them and had the greatest fun. Then I began to think that I was awfully clever and that I would write great books myself, and I was very solemn and serious. I expect I was simply hateful.”