Thirty-two Tite Street was a gloomy house across the road from a large Infirmary, from whose windows came an unceasing sound which Monica at first thought was the weeping of baby chicks, but which she later learned was the crying of infants in the nurseries. A rack of cards in the hall told her that Giles Revelstoke was on the top floor, and she was about to press the bell beneath his name when she heard someone coming down the stairs very rapidly and noisily, shouting “Sorree, sorree” in a loud voice. It was a very tall young man with tousled hair, who arrived beside her as her finger was poised to push.

“You want Giles?” said the young man. “Don’t ring; don’t dream of ringing; you’ll cut him to the heart if you ring. Go right up, and right in without knocking, and if you don’t see him about give a cooee. Most informal fellow in the world. Hurry up, old girl; up you go—”

Monica had dressed herself elegantly for this first meeting,with her new teacher, and had worked up a sense of the dignity of the occasion. She did not want to burst upon him without all the proper formalities. But the tall young man was not to be gainsaid, so she went up two flights of long dark stairs, and found a door at the top which opened into what was plainly a studio, an extremely crowded and untidy room furnished with a large work table and an upright piano, and beyond that nothing recognizable as furniture, but with heaps of books, papers and music piled on the floor and all the other flat surfaces. The only pleasing thing about the room, apart from a large black cat asleep on the piano top, was a dormer window set in the sloping roof which gave a view, through chimneypots, toward the Thames.

Should she sit down? But where? She stood for a few minutes, then picked her way through the debris on the floor to the window and looked out of it for a while. But she was disturbed by the sense that she was in somebody else’s room. She must not make free. But where was Mr Revelstoke? Had he forgotten that she was to come at four? The tousled young man had said that he was at home. This was quite unlike a visit to Molloy, who was as punctual as the clock, or to Sir Benedict, whose valet was always at hand to take her at once to the great man. What had Molloy called Revelstoke? “Quite the little genius”. This looked like a genius’s room. But how to inform the genius of her presence?

She coughed. Nothing happened. She coughed again, and walked about heavily, making a noise with her feet and feeling a fool. Should she go downstairs again, and ring the bell?

No; she would play the piano. She seated herself and played what came first into her head, which was her one-time favourite, Danse Macabre. The cat roused itself, yawned at her, and slept again.

She had played for perhaps three minutes, when a voice said very loudly behind her, “Stop that bloody row!” She turned, and standing in the doorway was a man. He was utterly naked.

Nothing in Monica’s previous experience had prepared her for such a spectacle, and it was the most shocking sight, within the bounds of nature, that could have confronted her. The Thirteeners, and everybody else with whom she had ever been intimately acquainted, thought very poorly of nakedness. Courtships, even when carried to lengths which resulted in hasty and muted weddings, were always conducted fully dressed. The intimacies of married life were negotiated in the dark, under blankets. Shame about nakedness was immensely valued, as a guarantee of high character. It is true that, when in Paris, Monica had been taken to the Louvre several times by Amy Neilson, and she had learned to look at naked statuary—even the Hermaphrodite—without betraying the discomfort she felt in the presence of those stony, bare monsters; but that was art and idealized form—no preparation for what she now saw—a naked man, not especially graced with beauty, coloured in shades which ranged between pink and whitey-drab, patchily hairy, and obviously very much alive.

He was smiling, which made it all worse. He seemed quite at his ease; it was she—she who was in the right, she the clothed, she the outraged one, who was overset. Monica had never fainted in her life, but she felt a lightness in her head now, an inability to get her breath, which might well rob her of consciousness.

“You’re the Canadian Nightingale, I suppose,” said he. “I forgot you were coming. Hold on a jiffy, while I get some clothes. But don’t play that trash any more.”

And a jiffy it was, for he was back again almost at once, wearing flannel trousers, and with his bare feet thrust into worn slippers, buttoning his shirt; he went behind the piano, picked up a bundle of woman’s garments and threw them through the door into the next room, shouting, “Come on, Persis, you lazy cow, get up and make us some tea.” The reply, which came through the door in a rich and well-bred contralto, was brief, and couched in words which Monica had never heard spoken in a woman’s voice before. “Shut up,” replied Revelstoke, “can’t you behave yourself when we have company—a distinguished guest from the Premier Dominion, our mighty ally in peace and war? Be a good girl and get some tea, and we shall have music to restore our souls.”

He took the cat in his arms and stroked it, as he turned again to Monica. “You mustn’t mind a degree of informality here which you haven’t met in the elegant environs of Sir Benedict Domdaniel. Brummagem Benny, as we sometimes call him in the musical world—without a hint of malice, mind you—likes to do himself very well. And properly so. He must keep up a position commensurate with his great and well-deserved reputation. But I, you see, am a very different sort of creature. You are now in the editorial offices of Lantern, undoubtedly the most advanced and unpopular critical journal being published in English today. The significance of the name will not escape you. Lantern—it is the lantern of Diogenes, searching for the honest, the true and the good, and it is similarly the lantern, or lamp-post, referred to in the good old Revolutionary cry “A la lanterne!”—because from this Lantern we suspend the hacked corpses of those whom we are compelled to judge harshly; you will not miss, either, the allusion to that Lantern Land which Master Francis Rabelais describes in his Pantagruel (with which I presume that you are amply acquainted) and which was the habitation of pedants and cheats in all branches of the arts; we allude to it slyly in our title by a species of gnomic homophony which will at once be apparent to you. This is a workroom, and workrooms are apt to be untidy. This will soon be your workroom, too, if we get on as well as I hope we shall. You had better meet my friend, Pyewacket, a delightful but musically uncritical cat.”

He was interrupted by the entry, from the bedroom, of a tall girl of twenty-three or four, wearing a not very fresh slip and nothing else; her long dark hair was hanging down her back and she had the tumbled look of one who has risen from bed.

“Match,” said she to Revelstoke. He found one on the table and gave it to her.

“Allow me to introduce Miss Persis Kinwellmarshe, daughter of Admiral Sir Percy Kinwellmarshe, retired, now of Tunbridge Wells. Miss Kinwellmarshe is one of my principal editorial assistants. We have been engaged in a type of editorial conference known as scrouperizing. You do know Rabelais? No? Pity!”

Monica disliked Miss Kinwellmarshe on sight. She had Bad Girl written all over her, and in addition she was extremely handsome, with a finely formed nose, through the crimson-shadowed nostrils of which she now seemed to be looking at Monica.

“It’s a pleasure to meet any acquaintance of Mr Revelstoke’s,” said she.

Monica knew when she was being mocked, but Amy’s prime injunction—”You can never go wrong by being simple, dear”—came to her rescue. So she bowed her head slightly toward Miss Kinwellmarshe, and said “How do you do?”