It was a small and low room.  I instinctively stooped, though there was no necessity for me to stoop.  The bar had no peculiarity.  It can be described in a breath:  Three perpendicular planes.  Back plane, bottles arranged exactly like books on bookshelves; middle plane, the upper halves of two women dressed in tight black; front plane, a counter, dotted with glasses, and having strange areas of zinc.  Reckon all that as the stage, and the rest of the room as auditorium.  But the stage of a private bar is more mysterious than the stage of a theatre.  You are closer to it, and yet it is far less approachable.  The edge of the counter is more sacred than the footlights.  Impossible to imagine yourself leaping over it.  Impossible to imagine yourself in that cloistered place behind it.  Impossible to imagine how the priestesses got themselves into that place, or that they ever leave it.  They are always there; they are always the same.  You may go into a theatre when it is empty and dark; but did you ever go into a private bar that was empty and dark?  A private bar is as eternal as the hills, as changeless as the monomania of a madman, as mysterious as sorcery.  Always the same order of bottles, the same tinkling, the same popping, the same time-tables, and the same realistic pictures of frothing champagne on the walls, the same advertisements on the same ash-trays on the counter, the same odour that wipes your face like a towel the instant you enter; and the same smiles, the same gestures, the same black fabric stretched to tension over the same impressive mammiferous phenomena of the same inexplicable creatures who apparently never eat and never sleep, imprisoned for life in the hallowed and mystic hollow between the bottles and the zinc.

In a tone almost inaudible in its discretion, Mr Brindley let fall to me as he went in—­

This is she.’

She was not quite the ordinary barmaid.  Nor, as I learnt afterwards, was she considered to be the ordinary barmaid.  She was something midway in importance between the wife of the new proprietor and the younger woman who stood beside her in the cloister talking to a being that resembled a commercial traveller.  It was the younger woman who was the ordinary barmaid; she had bright hair, and the bright vacant stupidity which, in my narrow experience, barmaids so often catch like an infectious disease from their clients.  But Annie Brett was different.  I can best explain how she impressed me by saying that she had the mien of a handsome married woman of forty with a coquettish and superficially emotional past, but also with a daughter who is just going into long skirts.  I have known one or two such women.  They have been beautiful; they are still handsome at a distance of twelve feet.  They are rather effusive; they think they know life, when as a fact their instinctive repugnance for any form of truth has prevented them from acquiring even the rudiments of the knowledge of life.  They are secretly preoccupied