CHAPTER XVI
MISS HEYDINGER'S PRIVATE THOUGHTS
The way from Chelsea to Clapham and the way from South Kensington to Battersea, especially if the former is looped about a little to make it longer, come very near to each other. One night close upon Christmas two friends of Lewisham's passed him and Ethel. But Lewisham did not see them, because he was looking at Ethel's face.
"Did you see?" said the other girl, a little maliciously.
"Mr. Lewisham—wasn't it?" said Miss Heydinger in a perfectly indifferent tone.
Miss Heydinger sat in the room her younger sister called her "Sanctum." Her Sanctum was only too evidently an intellectualised bedroom, and a cheap wall-paper of silvery roses peeped coquettishly from between her draped furniture. Her particular glories were the writing-desk in the middle of the room and the microscope on the unsteady octagonal table under the window. There were bookshelves of workmanship patently feminine in their facile decoration and structural instability, and on them an array of glittering poets, Shelley, Rossetti, Keats, Browning, and odd volumes of Ruskin, South Place Sermons, Socialistic publications in torn paper covers, and above, science textbooks and notebooks in an
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