It was then, after saying goodbye, and goodbye again as she drove away, that she gave way to a feeling of unrest. She drove slowly to Baker Street station, but by that time she was thinking of Mr. Cromartie. This caused her, almost mechanically, to swing her car round to the left, and shortly afterwards to take the Outer Circle. As she drove, her mind was almost blank; she was driving in that direction merely to dissipate a mood. All she was conscious of was that Cromartie was there—in the Zoo. She was tired, and driving distracted her. In a few moments she was passing the Gardens. She pulled up just over the tunnel, before reaching the main entrance. At this point she was as close as she could get to the new Ape-house, which lay, as she knew, under the shadow of the Mappin Terraces. She got out of the car and walked up to the palings. They were too high for her to look over, and when she pulled herself up by her hands there was nothing to be seen but the black shadows of evergreens and, through one break in them, a corner of the Mappin Terraces—a silhouette of black against the moonlight. As she looked it came into her head that it was like something familiar to her. Her wrists ached and she jumped down.

“John, John, why are you in there?” she said aloud. In a few moments she saw a policeman approaching her, so she got back into her car and drove on slowly.

As she passed the main entrance she turned again, and again she saw the Mappin Terraces.

“The Tower of Babel, of course,” she said aloud, “in Chambers’s Encyclopedia. It’s like Noah’s Ark, too, I suppose, as it’s a menagerie, and—Oh, curse! Oh, damn!” There were tears in her eyes, and the street lamps had become little circular rainbows. But what she said to herself was that it was awkward driving.

That night she could not sleep, and could find none of the ordinary defences against unhappiness. That is to say, she was unable to affect any kind of superiority to her troubles, besides which she saw them exactly as they were, in their naked horror, and was not able to put them in conventional categories. For could Miss Lackett have said to herself: “I have been in love with John, now I find he is mad. This is a terrible tragedy, it is very painful to think of people being mad, for me it is a disappointment in love. Such disappointments are the most painful to which a girl in my position can be exposed,” and so on—if she could have done this then Miss Lackett would have found a sure way to reduce her suffering to a minimum. For by putting forward such general ideas as madness and disappointment in love she could very soon have come to feel only the general emotion suited to these ideas. But as it was she could only think of John Cromartie, his face, voice, manners, and way of moving; of the particular cage in which she had last seen him, the smell of apes, the swarm of people staring at him and laughing, and of her own loneliness and misery which John had deliberately caused. That is to say she thought only of her pain, and did not cast about to give it a name. And naming a sorrow is a first step to forgetting it. About three o’clock in the morning she got out of bed and went down to the dining room, where she found a decanter of port, another of whiskey, and some Bath Olivers. She poured herself out a glass of port and tasted it, but its sweetness disgusted her, so she put it down and helped herself to the whiskey. After she had got down half a wineglass of the spirit, taking it neat as it came from the bottle, she felt much calmer. She drank another glass of it and then went up to her room, threw herself on her bed, and at once fell into a heavy, drunken sleep.