The Albemarle came to Salisbury Square on the fourth of August, a day late, because Mr. Pelham of Hare Court read it first.

This was the arrangement. Mr. Pelham took the magazine at a guinea a year, as a barrister in a small way of business takes a Tory monthly, to have it seen on his table; and when he had looked through it, which did not take him long, he gave it to his clerk to carry away. His clerk, who was called Kit by everyone but Mr. Pelham, carried it two hundred yards, out at the Inner Temple gate and along Fleet Street and down Salisbury Court, and up two pair of stairs over Dunning the law-stationer’s, and put it on the table in the front room, where his sister Clemency read it, who could not have afforded it and would not have bought it.

She read it standing: a tall young woman of six-and-twenty in a grey gown that had been turned once already, with ink on the second finger of her right hand that no pumice in London would shift. She had found that if she sat down to The Lord Warden she was committed to finishing it, and she had not the least intention of finishing it. It was the ninth number. The Warden was keeping the Marches for a King who did not trust him, in a prose that had been built, stone by stone, out of the fifteenth century, and the Albemarle had been running it since December to a silence that could be felt across London.

“Kit says it is universally thought very heavy,” said Mrs. Lydiard from the sofa.

“Kit has not read it.”

“Mr. Pelham says so. He says Albemarle Street keeps it for reasons.” Mrs. Lydiard had The Lady’s Cabinet open on her knee. She took the Cabinet because she had taken it in Bread Street, and the quarter’s subscription was one of the things that had come with them from Bread Street, like the sofa, and the clock, and the habit of ordering fish on a

Friday whether or not there was anyone to eat it. “What reasons, I cannot think. Lucy, if you put that ribbon on the bonnet you will look like a Methodist.”

Lucy, who was nineteen and could have worn a dishclout, held the ribbon against the straw and considered it in the glass. The glass had also come from Bread Street. Very little else had.

The rooms were two floors over the stationer’s, and they faced two ways. The back looked west, across the roofs of Whitefriars, to the Inner Temple, which was old, and walled, and had been built to be looked at from the inside. The front looked down into the square, where Richardson had printed Pamela over his shop eighty years ago, and where Whitefriars sent up, on a still day, the smell of ink. It was a respectable address. Everyone who lived in it said so.

Clemency turned the page. The ninth number of The Lord Warden contained, in order: an account of a siege, conducted with a thoroughness that made her want to lie down; the arrival of a letter under the King’s seal, which the Warden read in a room that was described down to the last stone of the hearth; and a sermon. Between the letter and the sermon there was one paragraph.

She read it. Then she read it again, which she had not meant to do, and stood for a moment with the magazine open in her hands and the smell of ink coming up from Whitefriars, and then she turned the corner of the page down.

She did not turn pages down. It was one of the things she did not do, like sitting down to the Warden, and like crying in the square.

“If it is so very heavy,” said her mother, “I wonder you trouble with it.”

“I don’t trouble with it,” said Clemency, and took it through to the back room, where the desk was.

*  *  *  *  *

At the desk she wrote the paragraph out in her own hand, to see whether it was as good as she thought.

It was better. Written out, with the siege and the sermon taken away from either side of it, it stood up by itself, and she saw what she had seen on the first reading and had not wanted to see: that whoever wrote the Warden could write, and that the ninth number was heavy not because he could not do otherwise but because he would not.

There was nothing in the paragraph that a reader of the Albemarle could have been expected to want. It had been put there for the writer’s own satisfaction, like a good hearth-stone in a room nobody visited.

She sat for some minutes with the pen dry.

The fifth number of The Mortimers of Mount Street lay under her left hand, eleven pages of it, wanting four more and an ending. It was due in the Row on the tenth. She was finishing it on the fourth because Mr. Baldock paid on delivery, and because the quarter’s rent was twelve pounds, and because Kit’s forty pounds was paid at Michaelmas and had been spent, in the manner of Kit’s forty pounds, some time in July. The Mortimers were a family in the Manchester trade who had taken a house in Mount Street, and the fifth number required Mr. Mortimer to lose his footman. She had been three days trying to make the loss of a footman matter to anyone.

She dipped the pen, and moved the paragraph from the Marches of 1403 to a dining-room in Mayfair, and gave it to Mr. Mortimer.

She read it over. It was funny. It had not been funny in the Marches, where it had been something else, and she was aware, in the part of her mind that kept accounts, that she had taken a thing that was not hers and had made it smaller in the taking. She was also aware that it was better where she had put it, and that nobody would ever know, because nobody read the Warden, and that the footman mattered now.

The number was finished by three, which it never was.

*  *  *  *  *

From Salisbury Square to Paternoster Row was ten minutes if one did not stop at the print-shop windows, and Clemency, who had the fifth number in a paper under her arm and seven guineas to collect, did not stop.

She went up Fleet Street with the carts, past St. Bride’s, and over the bottom of Fleet Market, from which, if one looked north, one could see the long wall of the Fleet Prison, where people lived who had not paid their rent. She did not look. She went up Ludgate Hill with the dome standing over everything like a thing that had been there before the street and would be there after it. The Row ran off the

churchyard on the north side, narrow and dark and smelling of paper, and had for two hundred years been the place where London’s books were made, and bought, and remaindered, and it was not a street that a lady walked down. It was a street that a young woman walked down with a parcel, and nobody looked at her, which was its chief recommendation.

The Ludgate had its office at number eleven, over Baldock’s shop. Mr. Baldock was in it.

He was a short, warm, quick man, Whig by conviction and by circulation, who had started the Ludgate two years ago on the principle that the Tories could not be allowed to have all the magazines, and who paid for fiction by the sheet and for poetry not at all. He took the number, and weighed it in his hand, which was his way of reading it, and said, “A sheet and a half.”

“A sheet and a half.”

“You are early.”

“I am always early, Mr. Baldock.”

“You are,” he agreed, and counted out the money, which he did not keep her waiting for, as he did not keep anyone waiting for whom he intended to go on paying. “I’ll tell you a thing. The Mortimers are liked. I had a letter Tuesday from a lady in Russell Square who wished to know whether the Author was acquainted with a family of the name. I said I could not undertake to say.”

“You could not,” said Clemency.

“I could not.” He put the number in his drawer. “They’re calling it Cockney stuff in Albemarle Street, you know. The Mortimers. Trade writing about trade.”

She had known that it would be called that, in the way that one knows the rent will be due; it was not a surprise, and it was not pleasant, and she found that she had put her hand flat on the counter. “Who is?”

“Oh, the young men. It is the word this year. They used it on Hunt, and on Hazlitt, and on that boy Keats who was a surgeon’s apprentice, and they will use it on anybody born east of Temple Bar who has the impudence to hold a pen. I should take it as a compliment. It means they have read you.” He looked at her over the drawer. “They have not had much to read of their own this twelvemonth. Have you seen the Warden?”

“I have seen it.”

“Nine numbers. They say in the Row that Albemarle Street loses twenty pounds a month on it and daren’t stop. Somebody’s nephew. Somebody’s money. It is universally thought—”

“Very heavy,” said Clemency. “Yes. The ninth number has one paragraph in it.”

Mr. Baldock, who had been in the trade thirty years and knew the sound of a judgment when he heard one, looked at her for a moment longer

than he need have done. Then he said, “Well. One is one more than the eighth,” and bade her good afternoon, and she went down the stairs into the Row with seven guineas and four shillings in her reticule and the word Cockney in her mouth like a bad tooth.

She did not go home. She went down Ludgate Hill, and back along Fleet Street past the end of her own court, and in at the Inner Temple gate, because it was past three and the Benchers let the public into the garden after three, and because Figgis the porter knew her as the clerk’s sister and would not ask what she wanted there. What she wanted there was the river. She had found that there was nowhere else in the City where a woman could stand still for a quarter of an hour without being supposed to be waiting for someone.

*  *  *  *  *

The garden lay at the bottom of the Temple, between the lawyers and the Thames, and belonged to neither.

It had been laid out by men who wanted somewhere to walk after dinner, and it had kept the shape of that wish: a long lawn going down to the river wall, gravel on either side, the plane trees along the walks, and at the foot the water-stairs where the Templars had once kept a barge and where there was now a boy who would take you to Westminster for sixpence. On the far side of the water Lambeth lay flat and green under the afternoon. The tide was going out, and the mud smelt as it always smelt, and the barges went down on it with their brown sails slack, and above and behind all of it, over the roofs of the Inner Temple, the two wooden giants of St. Dunstan’s struck the quarter with their clubs.

She went down the eastern walk to the wall and stood at it.

She stood there most days. It was the only place in London she knew where one could be still and not be in the way of anything, and she had come to use it as other women used a church. She did not think, particularly. She let the river go past. The word Cockney went past with it, and the lady in Russell Square, and Mr. Mortimer’s footman, and after a little while the ninth number of the Warden lying on the table in Salisbury Square with its corner turned down, which was the thing she had come to the wall not to think about, and which she thought about, briefly and without comfort, and put away.

There was a man on the bench under the second plane.

She saw him as she turned to go back up the walk, and she saw him the way one sees anything in the Temple garden on a weekday afternoon, which is to say hardly at all. He was a gentleman; one knew that by the coat, which had been made by somebody who did not advertise. He was

reading. He had the thing he was reading folded back on itself in his left hand, so that she could not see what it was, and in his right hand he had a pencil, and as she came level with him he made a mark in the margin, briefly, without looking up, as a man corrects a proof.

It was the pencil she noticed. She did not mark books. It was not a principle; it was that the books in Salisbury Square had come from Bread Street and would have to be sold back into Bread Street one day, and a book with a pencil in it was a book with a shilling off it. The gentleman on the bench marked what he read as if he would never in his life have to sell anything, and she passed behind him with the small, exact, unenvious attention one gives to a thing one has decided not to want.

He did not look up. She did not expect him to.

She went up the walk and out through the lane, past the sundial that told the passer-by to be gone about his business, and did as it said.

*  *  *  *  *

The set of chambers on the second floor of number five, King’s Bench Walk, had the name Mr. A. Kinross painted on the doorpost in the Inn’s own lettering, and had been let to Mr. Kinross for six years, and in six years had been entered by nobody but Mr. Kinross, the laundress, and the man who came for the coals.

It was not an address. His address was Grosvenor Square, where his aunt received for him on Thursdays, and where a letter would find him, and where, for most of the daylight hours of the week, he was not. He had been admitted a student of the Inner Temple at one-and-twenty, as the heir to Ardoch had been admitted before him, and had eaten the dinners, and had not been called, and had kept the chambers, which was all he had ever wanted of the law. A gentleman in the Inn was a gentleman whom the porter did not announce. Nobody knew that better than the porter.

The front room looked down over the garden to the river. The desk was at the window, and he sat at it now: a tall, dark, unsmiling man of two-and-thirty, with the kind of face that his aunt’s friends called distinguished and his aunt called a great pity, since he did nothing with it.

There were two things in the room that a visitor would have noticed, had there been a visitor. One was the files. They stood in deal boxes against the inner wall, seven-and-thirty of them, each lettered with a year, from the first of Richard to the last of the fourth Henry, and inside each box, on slips in a small, fast, Scotch hand, was every day of that year for which anything could be found: who was where, what the weather had done, what was paid for a horse at Shrewsbury and what a bishop said at York. It had

taken nine years. It was not finished. The other thing was a grammar of the English of the fourteen-hundreds, in manuscript, by the same hand, because nobody had printed one and he had wanted to be sure.

On the desk, under the window, lay the August number of the Ludgate, folded back on itself and marked in pencil.

The marks were in the fourth number of The Mortimers of Mount Street. There were three of them. Two were corrections, made in the margin with the brevity of a man who had never had to explain himself: against a passage in which Mrs. Mortimer’s carriage drew up at the railings of a house in Grosvenor Square, railings are set in the area, not the kerb; and against a dinner, no one in that square dines at six. The third was not a correction. It stood beside a paragraph near the end of the number, in which a girl of the Mortimer family had been made to understand, in the course of a single sentence, that she would not be asked to the house she had been dressed for. It was one word, written that afternoon on a bench in the garden below, and the word was competent.

He had been reading the Mortimers since May, in the way that a man who owns a share in a magazine reads the magazine that is beating it, and he had not yet decided what he thought of them, which was not a condition he was used to. He had taken them down to the garden that afternoon to decide, and had decided nothing but that one word; and while he sat there someone had come down the eastern walk and stood a while at the river wall, and passed behind his bench, and gone.

He had not looked up. He was writing the tenth number of The Lord Warden, in which the Warden would answer the King’s letter, and he had reached the place in it where the answer had to be given, and he had been there since noon.

The ninth number lay on the shelf behind him, as it lay in two thousand houses that had not read it. He did not know that in one of them it had been read twice, or that the corner of a page had been turned down, or that the best paragraph he had written in his life had that afternoon been carried up Fleet Street under a young woman’s arm, set down in a dining-room in Mount Street, put into the mouth of a man in the Manchester trade, and sold, with the rest of the number, for seven guineas.

He would know on the first of September. It was the fourth of August, and the tide was out, and St. Dunstan’s giants struck the half-hour, and he wrote the first word of the Warden’s answer, and struck it through.

(To be continued.)