week, and month after month, was too exacting; he bore the strain with
consummate ease; moreover, the most conscientious artist wishes to be
himself once now and again, if merely for a change.

The shop in Wangaroo occupied by the Museum of Marvels was rented from a
Chinese greengrocer, who carried on a business next door. The place had
originally been one shop, but Kit See, with the frugality of his race,
had partitioned it roughly, and with Oriental astuteness let the half for
nearly as much as he paid for the whole.

Kit See was a stout, cream Confucian with an oleaginous smile, and the
gentle, propitiatory man of an inferior people, cunning enough to realise
that if you cannot dominate it is wisest to be docile. He had a good
stock, a good business, a half-caste wife, and a noiseless, placid,
slit-eyed baby about the size of a Bologna sausage.

The Missing Link discovered this much through a crack in the partition,
and amused himself with his eyes glued to the slit when there were no
professional demands on his time and talents.

Most things that Mahdi did irritated Ammonia, whose jealousy and hatred
were intensified by Nickie's habit, when in a playful humour, of teasing
the gorilla by ostentatiously devouring delicacies Ammonia particularly
affected in Ammonia's sight, almost within his reach.

Nickie's interest in that hole in the wall was a course of consuming
anxiety to Ammonia. While Mahdi had his eye to the wall, the gorilla
would cling to the bars of his cage, pushing his blunt nose through, and
gibber and spit and protest in a high-pitched, querulous growl.