who is wise at five-and-twenty cannot make out at sixty why she has remained an old maid.  The delightful way to use it is that of a babe when he first discovers that a stick hits.  That is the way that Zora, who was not wise, used it over Septimus.  For the first time in her life she owned a human being.  A former joy in the possession of a devoted dog who did tricks was as nothing to this rapture.  It was splendid.  She owned him.  Whenever she had a desire for his company—­which was often, as solitude at Monte Carlo is more depressing than Zora had realized—­she sent a page boy, in the true quality of his name of chasseur, to hunt down the quarry and bring him back.  He would, therefore, be awakened at unearthly hours, at three o’clock in the afternoon, for instance, when, as he said, all rational beings should be asleep, it being their own unreason if they were not; or he would be tracked down at ten in the morning to some obscure little cafe in the town where he would be discovered eating ices and looking the worse for wear in his clothes of the night before.  As this meant delay in the execution of her wishes, Zora prescribed habits less irregular.  By means of bribery of chambermaids and porters, and the sacrifice of food and sleep, he contrived to find himself dressed in decent time in the mornings.  He would then patiently await her orders or call modestly for them at her residence, like the butcher or the greengrocer.

“Why does your hair stand up on end, in that queer fashion?” she asked him one day.  The hat episode had led to a general regulation of his personal appearance.

He pondered gravely over the conundrum for some time, and then replied that he must have lost control over it.  The command went forth that he should visit a barber and learn how to control his hair.  He obeyed, and returned with his shock parted in the middle and plastered down heavily with pomatum, a saint of more than methodistical meekness.  On Zora declaring that he looked awful (he was indeed inconceivably hideous), and that she preferred Struwel Peter after all, he dutifully washed his head with soda (after grave consultation with the chambermaid), and sunned himself once more in the smiles of his mistress.

Now and then, however, as she was kind and not tyrannical, she felt a pin-prick of compunction.

“If you would rather do anything else, don’t hesitate to say so.”

But Septimus, after having contemplated the world’s potentialities of action with lack-luster eye, would declare that there was nothing else that could be done.  Then she could rate him soundly.

“If I proposed that we should sail up the Andes and eat fried moonbeams, you would say ‘yes.’  Why haven’t you more initiative?”

“I’m like Mrs. Shandy,” he replied.  “Some people are born so.  They are quiescent; other people can jump about like grasshoppers.  Do you know grasshoppers are very interesting?” And he began to talk irrelevantly on insects.