That evening when she went up to her bedroom Jasmine found her aunt's novels waiting to be read--eighteen volumes published in the style of the early 'nineties and the late 'eighties, with titles like _The Sultan's Shadow_ and _The Rose of Sharon_. She read bits of each one in turn, and then abruptly felt that she had had enough, just as one feels that one has had enough Turkish-delight. Unfortunately Aunt Cuckoo said there was nothing she liked better than really intelligent criticism. So between reading the novels, learning massage, and combing the cats there was not much leisure for Jasmine, and what leisure she had was more than filled by rapid walks with Uncle Eneas over the Heath. Sirene is not a place that predisposes people to walk fast, and Uncle Eneas was continually being amazed that a niece thirty-five years younger than himself should be unable to quicken her pace to suit his own. Sometimes he said this in such a severe tone that Jasmine was half afraid that he would buy a lead and compel her to keep up with him. Luckily she was not expected to talk, and she soon discovered that she was only expected to say once in every ten minutes 'What an extraordinary life you have had, Uncle Eneas,' to maintain him in a perfectly good temper. Aunt May had written Jasmine a long letter from Spaborough expressing her delight at the news that she was treating Uncle Eneas and Aunt Cuckoo with more consideration than she had shown towards Uncle Hector and herself, announcing the imminent return of the family to Harley Street and magnanimously offering to give Jasmine lunch on her 'massage days,' inasmuch as Harley Street was, as no doubt she knew, quite close to Baker Street. Cousin Edith also wrote warmly and effusively; but the paleness of the ink, the thinness of the pen, and the flimsiness of the paper made the letter seem like an old letter found in a secret drawer and addressed to somebody who had been dead a century. She did not hear from Harry Vibart, and she wondered if he had written to her at Strathspey House and if her relatives there had kept back the letter. She supposed that she should never see him again, and she began to fear that she, like so many other girls, should drift into a profession to which she was not particularly attracted, or into a marriage for which she was not particularly anxious, or perhaps, worst of all, that she should merely shrink and shrink and shrink into a desiccated old maid like Cousin Edith. It was not an exhilarating prospect; Mustapha, the patriarch of the Angora cats, had his fur combed out less gently than usual that morning. Life was seeming unutterably dreary when Aunt Cuckoo came into the room, her eyes flashing with anticipation, her being rejuvenated by excitement, to say that one of the maids had a stiff neck, and to ask if Jasmine would immediately go to her room and operate on it.