sigh, of satisfaction.

He was back! He was back! He was slipping, slipping into distance
through the window into the street, under the fountain, its glittering
arms had caught him; he was up, the door was before him, he had the key.

"Time for you to put your things on, Master Ernest. And 'ow you've
dirtied your knees! There! Look!"

He shook himself, clambered down from the window, gave his nurse what
she described as "One of his old, old looks. Might be eighty when he's
like that.... They're all like it when they're young."

With a sigh he translated himself back into this new, tiresome
existence.


V

But after that morning things were never again quite the same. He gave
himself up deliberately to the new life.

With that serious devotion towards anything likely to be of real
practical value to him that was, in his later years, never to fail him,
he attacked this business of "words." He discovered that if he made
certain sounds when certain things were said to him he provoked instant
applause. He liked popularity; he liked the rewards that popularity
brought him. He acquired a formula that amounted practically to "Wash
dat?" And whenever he saw anything new he produced his question. He
learnt with amazing rapidity. He was, his nurse repeatedly told his