“I am sorry, I don’t like this house,” I said quite firmly, but he took no notice and told me to wait till I had seen round a bit. That revived her. When Mrs. Simpson is at her worst I see advertisements in the way I am told drunken men see spiders. I became Mrs. Simpson in an advertisement for somebody’s lemonade. I ran about over a tennis lawn; young men with Arrow collars and Viyella shirts lay on the grass beside a picnic basket; some one else, in a punt, poured out a new brand of lime-juice cordial. There was a high wall round our garden, and up the wall crept monstrous roses grown under the influence of pills for plants. My grandfather was there too in a smoking-cap, rolling the lawn with a special kind of roller. “Look here,” I said, “I am so sorry, but I cannot bear this. I don’t like the shape of the lady who lived here.” “What do you mean?” asked the agent, looking at me over some horrid eyeglasses (I think they were some new patent ones that boasted of being practically indistinguishable from the real eye). “It was an old gentleman that lived here with three daughters. Who told you there was a lady?” “It doesn’t matter,” I persisted. “An old man with daughters is just as bad--I mean, I don’t think the house is healthy. If you will send me your list I will go round by myself.” I went to three or four other agents until at last I found one who did not know Mrs. Simpson, and I took the first house he offered me. Coleridge, or some one of that sort, had lived there, but he had been ousted by some rich Americans who are so volatile that they do not stick like the Mrs. Simpsons, so I very soon had the place to myself. When we go I shall scrape the walls and remove all the fittings and the tragic little bits of linoleum and empty bottles. The deadest mutton is never so dead as objects that have been called into temporary life by human ownership. I would rather find fifteen naked corpses in a house than one old pair of trousers. I should like to take that house agent to Pompeii and show him the petrified bodies and their belongings and ask him which made his flesh creep most. It might make him abandon his gruesome trade and be the end of Mrs. Simpson. But if there were no houses to let, where would all the poor ladies of England lay their eggs? It is not practicable. _CHAPTER XV_: SHOPPING IN LONDON