One other member the family may be said to have: Mr. Adolphus--or Dollie--Heathcote, an articled pupil of Alderley's who is continually dropping in in the evening and is on the best terms with himself and every one: a very agreeable ornamental person. When it was the fashion to present me with contributions of furniture or knick-knacks for my rooms, Dollie, who seems to have an infallible scent for everything that is, in his own phrase, dodgy, and who lights his cigarettes with a pocket spirit-lamp that would not be out of place in the _Arabian Nights_, gave me a clock on a new design which dispenses with a dial but records the hours and minutes on little numbered labels. These labels are flipped away by an invisible agency one by one as they expire, and are for one's comfort almost too much like performers in a sombre moral drama illustrating the flight of time and the approach of annihilation. Dollie, however, I am sure has no such thoughts. "A top-hole idea," he called it. CHAPTER III THE HAUNTS OF MEN REVISITED AND THE FIRST BEMERTONIAN NUGGET My first few days over Bemerton's were a dream of joy and liberty. I am happy enough still (my nature is happy), but in those first few days I was realising the desire of half a lifetime--I was in the dovecote, so to speak, that all my thoughts had been homing to, day and night, for years and years. How often had I awakened and lain awake for hours, powerless to sleep again with all London in my head--not only its sights and sounds but the scents of it. Latterly, when the date of my release was fixed and grew nearer, this small-hour excitement had so intensified that I began to fear brain-fever, and indeed at the end nothing but drugs had saved me; but the voyage put things right: once again the sea washed away--as who says? is it not Lucretius?--the ills of man. At my stepsister's I was in a kind of trance. It was all so strange and unreal, and also there, even if subconsciously, I played the voluptuary, the epicure, and postponed the true rapture to the last, thinking that I would not begin to realise all the best anticipations until my rooms were my own--until once again I was my own master, as one never is in any one else's house. Dreams of London liberty that were dreamed alone should be realised alone; and so, although Naomi and I went everywhere, and I tasted many of the pleasures I had meditated upon, there was, as it were, a veil between them and my sensorium, not to be lifted until I was free once more and the obligations of a grateful guest were removed. Dear Naomi, I think, understood, and hastened accordingly in her search for rooms.