“Ah, the wee soul!” said he, then like lightning banished the infant, and put on an expression which suggested a sick chimpanzee.

The chimpanzee gave place to something very airy, with hands clasped over its heart.

Working on these lines, Molloy breathed the muhd of the soldier, the justice, and the Pantaloon—this last such a picture of trembling, piping eld as even the Comédie Française has never attempted. And his final portrait of dissolution—

seemed to couple senility with the last ravages of paresis in a manner truly frightening.

It was not ham acting. It was something more alarming than that. Into each of these shopworn cliches of pantomime Molloy injected a charge of vitality which gave it a shocking truth. Vocally his performance was powerful, if in bad taste; physically it was rowdy and grotesque; but his meaning was palpable. To Monica it was a revelation; she had never seen anyone carry on like that before. She admired, and loyally fought down the embarrassment which rose in her. She was quite sure, however, that she could never do it herself.

Such resistance was like catnip to Molloy. Part of his profession was to prove to people that they could do what they believed to be outside their powers. Monica was put to work, exhorted, bullied and cajoled until, in a week or two she could cradle the baby, whine, sigh, roar, dogmatize (stroking an imaginary beard), shake like the Pantaloon, and at last, with eyes closed and hands hanging limp like the paws of a poisoned dog, await the stroke of death. Compared with Molloy’s Protean performance hers was the merest shadow, but it was far beyond anything that she had ever dreamed she might achieve.

“Now we’re beginning to get somewhere,” said Molloy on the day when, at the third time of repetition, Monica had excelled herself. “Y’know, between ourselves, the stage people are always after me. A lot o’ them come for lessons, y’see, and they say, ‘Murty, you’re a born director, and there’s a dearth of ‘em; how about it?’ But I say, ‘Boys, if it was only a question of speech, I’d do it like a shot, but I’ve no talent for the tableau side o’ the thing. I’ve th’ear, but I lack th’eye’.”

This was the process of vocal and spiritual unbuttoning which Sir Benedict Domdaniel had said would be accomplished by Murtagh Molloy. From the Seven Ages of Man they progressed to the First Chorus from Henry V, and at the beginning of each lesson Molloy would say—”Right; now let’s have it—O for a Muse afar!” Obediently Monica would set her feet apart, poise her head on her neck, breathe a muhd commensurate with England’s martial glory and declaim—

and so to the end of the speech, with horses, monarchs, and apologies for the inadequacy of the Elizabethan theatre, all complete. She was becoming quite pleased with herself, torn between her pride in being able to satisfy Molloy, and a sense of shame in the amount of noise and strutting which that involved.

In these declamatory exercises she was not permitted to speak the words in her accustomed way, and at first she used her true ear to copy Molloy’s own accent. But when she did this he astonished her by declaring that she was speaking with a pronounced Canadian twangs and compelled her to adopt a tune and colour of speech which certainly was not English as she heard it spoken by Mrs Merry, or by any of the people she met in chance contacts, but which she learned to identify in the theatre, at the performances of classical plays to which she was constantly being urged by Molloy. It was not the “English accent” mocked by Kevin and Alex, and forbidden by her mother, but it was not Canadian either; it was a speech that Garrick would not have found very strange, and of which Goldsmith would have approved.

Going to the theatre was, at first, a lonely business, and she did not like it. She had studied one or two of the plays of Shakespeare in school, but she had never associated them with any idea of entertainment. Nor was her first visit to the Old Vic a happy one, for the play was The Comedy of Errors, very cleverly transformed by a young director with his name to make into a mid-Victorian farce, in which the two Antipholuses, in chimney-pot hats and Dundreary whiskers, and the two Dromios, in identical liveries, rushed up and downstairs on a twirly scaffolding which was called Ephesus, until at last they were united with an Aemilia and a Luciana in crinolines and ringlets. Several critics had said that this treatment illuminated the play astonishingly, but for Monica it remained a depressing mystery. She was happier when, in a few weeks, it gave place to Romeo and Juliet. Peggy Stamper, dirtier than before, had hunted her up, and they went together. Afterward they discussed the play in detail at a Corner House and Monica expressed strong disapproval of the conduct of Friar Lawrence; if he had not tried to be so clever, everything might very well have been straightened out, and the lovers made happy. But then, said Peggy, where would the tragedy have been? And was it not better that Romeo and Juliet should have been unhappy, and tremendous, than happy, and just like everybody else? Monica would not have this; common sense, said she, was surely to be expected of everybody.

“But if you fill the world with common sense,” countered Peggy, there’ll be precious little art left. Art begins where common sense leaves off.” And, perhaps as a result of Money’s unbuttoning process, Monica had to agree that this was so.

Without becoming intimate with Peggy, Monica saw a good deal of her, and they did much of their theatre-going together. She met some of Peggy’s friends, who were all art students and not particularly articulate or interesting, inclining to shop-talk, dirt, corduroys, beer and fried foods. But in their company she visited some of the galleries (for Molloy had urged her to study gesture and bodily posture in paintings and sculpture, as visible evidences of muhd) and learned enough from them to realize that she had no taste, and was unlikely ever to develop any. Peggy kindly attributed this to her musical interests, and Monica reconciled herself to possessing, like Molloy, th’ear but not th’eye.

These casual acquaintanceships were not enough to keep Monica from being very lonely and often in low spirits. Except for her visits to Molloy most of her days were long and dull. True, she went every morning to Madame Heber for a lesson in French, which she shared with two dry young men who were preparing for the Civil Service, and every afternoon at five o’clock she had a lesson in German from Dr Rudolph Schlesinger, in the company of a spotty girl who was mastering that language so that she might read Freud in the original. Language study, and the exercises which Molloy ordered, filled up much of the time she spent in her rooms in Courtfield Gardens. But she still had plenty of time in which to be lonely. The few sticks which she and Mr Boykin had purchased had made her rooms convenient, though far from luxurious, and she had learned how to feed herself economically and fairly well. She was even able to keep almost warm, though the gas-meter was remorseless in its demand for shillings. And, as winter wore away and spring came she began to see some of the strange, irregular beauty of London. But loneliness would not be banished, and Sundays were an endless weariness. Against all Thirteener custom, she began to go to Sunday movies.