He pondered gravely over the conundrum for some time, and then replied that he must have lost control over it. The command went forth that he should visit a barber and learn how to control his hair. He obeyed, and returned with his shock parted in the middle and plastered down heavily with pomatum, a saint of more than methodistical meekness. On Zora declaring that he looked awful (he was indeed inconceivably hideous), and that she preferred Struwel Peter after all, he dutifully washed his head with soda (after grave consultation with the chambermaid), and sunned himself once more in the smiles of his mistress.
Now and then, however, as she was kind and not tyrannical, she felt a pin-prick of compunction.
"If you would rather do anything else, don't hesitate to say so."
But Septimus, after having contemplated the world's potentialities of action with lack-luster eye, would declare that there was nothing else that could be done. Then she could rate him soundly.
"If I proposed that we should sail up the Andes and eat fried moonbeams, you would say 'yes.' Why haven't you more initiative?"
"I'm like Mrs. Shandy," he replied. "Some people are born so. They are quiescent; other people can jump about like grasshoppers. Do you know grasshoppers are very interesting?" And he began to talk irrelevantly on insects.
Their intercourse encouraged confidential autobiography. Zora learned the whole of his barren history. Fatherless, motherless, brotherless, he was alone in the world. From his father, Sir Erasmus Dix, a well-known engineer, to whose early repression much of Septimus's timidity was due, he had inherited a modest fortune. After leaving Cambridge he had wandered aimlessly about Europe. Now he lived in a little house in Shepherd's Bush, with a studio or shed at the end of the garden which he used as a laboratory.
"Why Shepherd's Bush?" asked Zora.
"Wiggleswick likes it," said he.
"And now he has the whole house to himself? I suppose he makes himself comfortable in your quarters and drinks your wine and smokes your cigars with his friends. Did you lock things up?"