"Oh, Maurice, you _are_ awful," she protested. But, Apollo urging him, Maurice would finish: "When they said: 'You're our fate,' She replied, 'It's too late.' So they went away sad and grew skinny." "Lunatic!" she said. "And don't talk about getting thin. Look at me. Nothing but skin and grief." "Nonsense," said Maurice, and went on rhyming: "There was a young lady said: 'What! My figure is going to pot.'" And then two more lines that will have to be filled in like your figure, and then: "They all of them said: 'No it's not.'" "Well, you're not much more than a rasher of wind yourself," commented Jenny. "Ha! ha!" shouted Maurice. "That's good. Hullo, here's Trafalgar Square. Aren't we going a pace down Whitehall? Jenny, there aren't any words for what I feel." He hugged her close. "Oh, mind!" she protested, withdrawing from the embrace. "People can see us." "My dear, they don't matter. They don't matter a damn. Not one of them matters the tiniest dash." Nor did they indeed to lovers in the warm apricot of a fine September sunset. What to them were dusty clerks with green shining elbows, and government officials and policemen, and old women with baskets of tawny chrysanthemums? Fairies only were fit to be their companions. The taxi hummed on over the road shadowed by the stilted Gothic of the Houses of Parliament, hummed out of the shadow and into Grosvenor Road, where the sun was splashing the river with pools of coppery light. The stream was losing its burnished ripples and a gray mist was veiling the fire-crowned chimneys of Nine Elms when the taxi drew up by 422 Grosvenor Road. "Right to the very top," called Maurice. "I do hope you don't mind." As he spoke he caught her round the waist and gathered her to his side to climb the stairs. "It's an old house. I've got an attic for my studio. Castleton's out. An old woman buried somewhere near the center of the earth cooks for me. When you see her, you'll think she's arrived via Etna. Jenny, I'm frightfully excited at showing you my studio." At last they reached the topmost landing, which was lit by a skylight opaque with spiders' webs and dust. The landing itself was full of rubbish, old clothes, and tattered volumes and, as if Maurice sought to emulate Phaethon, a bicycle. "Not in these!" said Jenny. "You _don't_ carry that up and down all these stairs every day?" "Never," said Maurice gayly. "Not once since I carried it up for the first time a year ago." "You silly old thing." "I am. I am. But isn't it splendid to be able to be silly?" He opened the door of the studio and Jenny walked into what seemed an astonishingly large room. There were windows at either end and a long skylight overhead. The ceiling was raftered and on the transverse beams were heaped all sorts of things that young men bring to London but never use, such as cricket-bats and tennis-racquets and skates.