brotherly intimacy with a lame donkey belonging to the sexton, and used to
feed him with _pâté de foie gras_ sandwiches, specially prepared by
Wiggleswick, until he was authoritatively informed that raw carrots would
be more acceptable. To see the two of them side by side watching the ducks
in the pond wag their tails was a touching spectacle.

Another amenity in Septimus's peaceful existence was Emmy.

Being at this time out of an engagement, she paid various flying visits to
Nunsmere, bringing with her an echo of comic opera and an odor of _Peau
d'Espagne_. She dawned on Septimus's horizon like a mischievous and
impertinent planet, so different from Zora, the great fixed star of his
heaven, yet so pretty, so twinkling, so artlessly and so obviously
revolving round some twopenny-halfpenny sun of her own, that he took her,
with Wiggleswick, the ducks and the donkey, into his close comradeship. It
was she who had ordained the carrots. She had hair like golden thistledown,
and the dainty, blonde skin that betrays every motion of the blood. She
could blush like the pink tea-rose of an old-fashioned English garden. She
could blanch to the whiteness of alabaster. Her eyes were forget-me-nots
after rain. Her mouth was made for pretty slang and kisses. Neither her
features nor her most often photographed expression showed the tiniest
scrap of what the austere of her sex used to call character. When the world
smiled on her she laughed: when it frowned, she cried. When she met
Septimus Dix, she flew to him as a child does to a new toy, and spent
gorgeous hours in pulling him to pieces to see how he worked.

"Why aren't you married?" she asked him one day.

He looked up at the sky--they were on the common--an autumn stretch of
pearls and purples, with here and there a streak of wistful blue, as if