After the elephant, who is all deliberate matter, I visit the otter, who is all nervous fluid and the merriest creature in the gardens, and so, by way of the magical lizards, come to Mr. Wiles and Barbara. That is my short round. When there is more time I extend it to take in the gay little foreign birds with the pretty names, who live between the lizards and the bears, and who, with the lizards, seem to be almost more wonderful achievements on the part of the Creator than the elephant or giraffe. And I like also to look once again at the King Penguin and the Snow Leopards; but the lions and tigers I rarely visit, for I cannot bear the forlorn look in their eyes. It hurts me to think that it is partly my subscription that is keeping them here. And coming out again into the world of men, it seems strange and unbelievable that anyone should choose to live anywhere but close to Regent's Park. CHAPTER IV IN WHICH I AM FORBIDDEN TO BE IDLE AND THEREFORE FIND CONGENIAL EMPLOYMENT Naomi was very firm about my finding an occupation. Men must do something, she said. As for herself, she intended to retain her various poor protégés, and to continue to visit her mother in Queen Anne's Gate every day, and probably lunch there; which made it the more important that I should have something to engage me. "A man who has no employment is like a ship without a rudder," she said. I replied that perhaps it was employment enough to be married to an epigrammatist. This being received without enthusiasm, I pointed out that I was executor to no fewer than three persons. "All of whom are alive and extremely healthy," said Naomi. "True," I answered, "but think how insecure is one's hold upon life. At any moment one of them may be crushed by a falling aeroplane and plunge me into affairs." "'It's ill waiting for dead men's shoes,'" Naomi quoted, and at the totally new light which the proverb threw upon the attitude of the ordinary executor I broke down. "How do you know," I asked, "that I am not writing a really valuable work on the Zoo? A philosophical treatise on apes?" "You're not, are you?" she asked. Naomi for all her shrewdness has a childlike belief in certain things that she hears. A child could pull her leg. "No," I said; "I am not. But I had thoughts of playing a little at writing. Wouldn't that satisfy you?" She did not thoroughly kindle to it. "I hope you will write, dear," she said; "but that is only play anyway. And what would you write?" "Well," I said, "supposing I was to write a book about you?" Naomi was indignant. "About me? How could I make a book?" "Very well then," I replied; "about us." "But we are so uninteresting," she said. "We're so ordinary. Besides, I don't think, dear, you have--have you?--quite the novelist's gifts."