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a few words appeared in full radiance, then swooned and all was over.
    I sank down in an armchair and mused for some moments. The words I had seen were Russian words, part of a Russian sentence — quite insignificant in themselves, really (not that I might have expected from the flame of chance the slick intent of a novelist's plot). The literal English translation would be 'thy manner always to find...' — and it was not the sense that struck me, but the mere fact of its being in my language. I had not the vaguest inkling as to who she might be, that Russian woman whose letters Sebastian had kept in close proximity to those of Clare Bishop — and somehow it perplexed and bothered me. From my chair beside the fireplace, which was again black and cold, I could see the fair light of the lamp on the desk, the bright whiteness of paper brimming over the open drawer and one sheet of foolscap lying alone on the blue carpet, half in shade, cut diagonally by the limit of the light. For a moment I seemed to see a transparent Sebastian at his desk; or rather I thought of that passage about the wrong Roquebrune: perhaps he preferred doing his writing in bed?
    After a while I went on with my business, examining and roughly classifying the contents of the drawers. There were many letters. These I set aside to be gone through later. Newspaper cuttings in a gaudy book, an impossible butterfly on its cover. No, none of them were reviews of his own books: Sebastian was much too vain to collect them; nor would his sense of humour allow him to paste them in patiently when they did come his way. Still, as I say, there was an album with cuttings, all of them referring (as I found out later when perusing them at leisure) to incongruous or dream-absurd incidents which had occurred in the most trivial places and conditions. Mixed metaphors too, I perceived, met with his approval, as he probably considered them to belong to the same faintly nightmare category. Between some legal documents I found a slip of paper on which he had begun to write a story — there was only one sentence, stopping short but it gave me the opportunity of observing the queer way Sebastian had — in the process of writing — of not striking out the words which he had replaced by others, so that, for instance, the phrase I encountered ran thus: .As he a heavy A heavy sleeper, Roger Rogerson, old Rogerson bought old Rogers bought, so afraid Being a heavy sleeper, old Rogers was so afraid of missing tomorrows. He was a heavy sleeper. He was mortally afraid of missing tomorrow's event glory early train glory so what he did was to buy and bring home in a to buy that evening and bring home not one but eight alarm clocks of different sizes and vigour of ticking nine eight eleven alarm clocks of different sizes ticking which alarm clocks nine alarm clocks as a cat has nine which he placed which made his bedroom look rather like a'
    I was sorry it stopped here.
    Foreign coins in a chocolate box: francs, marks, schillings, crowns — and their small change. Several fountain pens. An Oriental amethyst, unset. A rubber band. A glass tube of tablets for headache, nervous breakdown, neuralgia, insomnia, bad dreams, toothache. The toothache sounded rather dubious. An old notebook (1926) filled with dead telephone numbers. Photographs.
    I thought I should find lots of girls. You know the kind — smiling in the sun, summer snapshots, continental tricks of shade, smiling in white on pavement, sand or snow — but I was mistaken. The two dozen or so of photographs I shook out of a large envelope with the laconic Mr H. written on top in Sebastian's hand, all featured one and the same person at different stages of his life: first a moonfaced urchin in a vulgarly cut sailor suit, next an ugly boy in a cricket-cap, then a pug-nosed youth, and so on till one arrived at a series of full-grown Mr H. — a rather repellent bulldog type of man, getting steadily fatter in a world of photographic