anxious to be human. This will make you human."

"Do you think it will?" he asked seriously. "If you do, I'll come."

But at Versailles they lost him, and the party, as a party, knew him no
more. What he did with himself in Paris Zora could not imagine. A Cambridge
acquaintance--one of the men on his staircase who had not yet terminated
his disastrous career--ran across him in the Boulevard Sévastopol.

"Why--if it isn't the Owl! What are you doing?"

"Oh--hooting," said Septimus.

Which was more information as to his activities than he vouchsafed to give
Zora. Once he murmured something about a friend whom he saw occasionally.
When she asked him where his friend lived he waved an indeterminate hand
eastwards and said, "There!" It was a friend, thought Zora, of whom he had
no reason to be proud, for he prevented further questioning by adroitly
changing the conversation to the price of hams.

"But what are you going to do with hams?"

"Nothing," said Septimus, "but when I see hams hanging up in a shop I
always want to buy them. They look so shiny."

Zora's delicate nostrils sniffed the faintest perfume of a mystery; but a
moment afterwards the Callenders carried her off to Ledoyen's and
Longchamps and other indubitable actualities in which she forgot things
less tangible. Long afterwards she discovered that the friend was an old
woman, a _marchande des quatre saisons_ who sold vegetables in the Place de