A beautiful vers libre flew like a coloured dove into Henry's brain just as he crossed the Circus:
Red-chested Minotaur
Thrust
Blow on Blow.
Golden apples showering
From Autumn trees
In wolf-haunted
Forest—
Had he not been sworn at by the driver of a swiftly advancing taxi-cab he might have thought of a second verse equally good.
Arriving at his destination, he found Mrs. Tenssen all alone seated at the table playing Patience, with a pack of very greasy cards. One useful lesson at least Henry was to learn from this eventful year, a lesson that would do him splendid service throughout his life—namely, that there is nothing more difficult than to discover a human being, man or woman, who is really wicked all the way round and the whole way through. People who seem to be thoroughly wicked, whom one passionately desires to be thoroughly wicked, will suddenly betray kindnesses, softnesses, amiabilities, imbecilities that simply do not go with the rest of their terrible character. This is very sad and makes life much more difficult than it ought to be.
It is indeed to be doubted whether a completely wicked human being has ever appeared on this planet.
It had already puzzled Henry on several occasions that Mrs. Tenssen, who as nearly resembled a completely wicked person as he had ever beheld, should care so passionately for the simple game of Patience, and should take flowers, as he discovered that she did, once a week to the Children's Hospital in Cleseden Street.
He would so greatly have preferred that she should not do these things. She did them, it might be, as a blind, a concealment, an alibi, even as Count Fosco had his white mice and Uncle Silas played the flute, but they did not appear to be a disguise; she seemed to enjoy doing them.
She greeted Henry with great affection. She had been very kind to him of late. He did not like her any better than on his first vision of her; he liked her indeed far less. He did not know any one, man or woman, from whom sex so indecently protruded. It was always as though she sat quite naked in front of him and that she liked it to be so.
She had once made what even his innocent mind understood as improper advances to him, and he had not now the very slightest doubt of the reason why the various gentlemen, of all sizes and ages, came and had tea with her.
All this made him very sick and put him into an agony of desire to seize Christina and deliver her from the horrible place, but until now he had not thought of any plan, and one of his principal difficulties was that he could never succeed in being with Christina alone.