orn.
''You are soft on me now,'' she says, drawing back her arm, pulling down her sleeve, ''now you''ve another to be hard to. Good luck to you trying. I''d like to see you bruise him, before he bruises you.''
Her words shake me a little—but only a little; and when she is gone, it seems to me that I forget her. For Richard is also gone— gone three days before, on my uncle''s business, and on ours—and my thoughts are all with him, with him and with London. London! where I have never been, but which I have imagined so fiercely, so often, I am sure I know. London, where I will find my liberty, cast off my self, live to another pattern—live without patterns, without hides and bindings—without books! I will ban paper from my house!
I lie upon my bed and try to imagine the house that I will take, in London. I cannot do it. I see only a series of voluptuous rooms— dim rooms, close rooms, rooms-within-rooms—dungeons and cells—the rooms of Priapus and Venus.—The thought unnerves me. I give it up. The house will come clearer in time, I am sure of it.
I rise and walk and think again of Richard, making his passage across the city, picking his way through the night to the dark thieves'' den, close to the river. I think of him roughly greeted by crooks, I think of him casting off his coat and hat, warming his hands at a fire, looking about him. I think of him, Macheath-like, counting off a set of vicious faces—Mrs Vixen, Betty Doxy, Jenny Diver, Molly Brazen—until he finds the face he seeks . . .