He was gone.  And Archie, holding the bag, made his way to the lift. 
The bag squirmed gently in his grip.

The only other occupant of the lift was a striking-looking woman of foreign appearance, dressed in a way that made Archie feel that she must be somebody or she couldn’t look like that.  Her face, too, seemed vaguely familiar.  She entered the lift at the second floor where the tea-room is, and she had the contented expression of one who had tea’d to her satisfaction.  She got off at the same floor as Archie, and walked swiftly, in a lithe, pantherist way, round the bend in the corridor.  Archie followed more slowly.  When he reached the door of his room, the passage was empty.  He inserted the key in his door, turned it, pushed the door open, and pocketed the key.  He was about to enter when the bag again squirmed gently in his grip.

From the days of Pandora, through the epoch of Bluebeard’s wife, down to the present time, one of the chief failings of humanity has been the disposition to open things that were better closed.  It would have been simple for Archie to have taken another step and put a door between himself and the world, but there came to him the irresistible desire to peep into the bag now—­not three seconds later, but now.  All the way up in the lift he had been battling with the temptation, and now he succumbed.

The bag was one of those simple bags with a thingummy which you press.  Archie pressed it.  And, as it opened, out popped the head of Peter.  His eyes met Archie’s.  Over his head there seemed to be an invisible mark of interrogation.  His gaze was curious, but kindly.  He appeared to be saying to himself, “Have I found a friend?”

Serpents, or Snakes, says the Encyclopaedia, are reptiles of the saurian class Ophidia, characterised by an elongated, cylindrical, limbless, scaly form, and distinguished from lizards by the fact that the halves (rami) of the lower jaw are not solidly united at the chin, but movably connected by an elastic ligament.  The vertebra are very numerous, gastrocentrous, and procoelous.  And, of course, when they put it like that, you can see at once that a man might spend hours with combined entertainment and profit just looking at a snake.

Archie would no doubt have done this; but long before he had time really to inspect the halves (rami) of his new friend’s lower jaw and to admire its elastic fittings, and long before the gastrocentrous and procoelous character of the other’s vertebrae had made any real impression on him, a piercing scream almost at his elbow—­startled him out of his scientific reverie.  A door opposite had opened, and the woman of the elevator was standing staring at him with an expression of horror and fury that went through, him like a knife.  It was the expression which, more than anything else, had made Mme. Brudowska what she was professionally.  Combined with a deep voice and a sinuous walk, it enabled her to draw down a matter of a thousand dollars per week.