Page:Christopher Morley--Tales from a rolltop desk.djvu/121

about to butt my head against all the walls that hem in the beginner.

"It was one of those old four-story dwellings that are now mostly boarding-houses, and it was run by a good-hearted widow who would let her rooms only to men, because she said they were less trouble than women. Her house was clean and incredibly cheap, and almost all the lodgers were young fellows like myself—students, or starveling artists, or chaps with literary ambitions. That was how I had heard of the place, through another fellow who lived there and had built up a little sort of coterie in the house. He was Blackmore. You know his name; he gave up art long ago. He's now the art editor of the Mother, Home, and Heaven Magazine.

"Mrs. Vesey, our landlady, was quite a character. I was always rather a favourite with her, because the very first day I came to her house I happened to find her cat, which had wandered away some days before, leaving her disconsolate. The cat's name, I remember, was Nemo. She had called it so because, with that admirable virginity of mind that one finds only in a childless married woman, she was uncertain of the animal's sex. Anyway, it was a fine big creature, and the apple of Mrs. Vesey's pie. She talked so much about it