After all, Downing thinks, wood is dead, too-homogenous, and paint, it is wanting, and he needs to re-create nuanced colors of the eyes of the aardvark, the iris and sclera, and he can do it with glass.

There is one glassmith Downing knows in Leamington Spa. But he only blows fruit bowls. Glass cups and glass vases. The only man in the world Downing knows who can make him a set of glass eyes must be Harold Skinner, Downing’s former flatmate at Oxford, now a respected prosthetic specialist in London who used to make dolls’ eyes and now makes human eyes, replicas for soldiers, blind people, and so, Downing decides, it means a trip to London.

London has been on Downing’s brain as of late, but only in the way the promise of excitement haunts an artist who finds himself buried in the tedium of making. London was a notion planted early in the week when Downing received a card in the mail, an invitation from Lady Rebecca Ostlet, Richard Ostlet’s new wife, the young botanist, to visit her, an invitation Downing had deliberately planned to ignore but now deliberately plans to accept, as it must mean that Richard has returned from Africa, and Downing, now armed with a reason, can suddenly see the two of them together journeying to Harold Skinner to order the glass eyes and then going for pints at a public house Richard enjoys, the Ye Olde Mitre in Farringdon, where Ostlet (round and jolly) and Downing (thin and dour) will sit side by side at a small table in a corner for hours with their feet flat on the red carpet, their backs slumped against the dark wood (it is summer; there won’t be a fire), discussing the aardvark until they go red-faced and sweaty, relaxing from drink, and Downing can now so easily picture how the whole thing will play out from there.

Setting himself to write Rebecca Ostlet, Downing does not worry the fact that his friend Richard has married, nor that he, Downing, was not invited to the wedding, nor even, particularly, that the invitation has come from the wife and not the man himself. Rebecca Ostlet would like to see him on “rather pressing business,” she has written, requesting a hasty “Return of Post,” and would Titus Downing accept an invitation to stay with her at the Ostlet household, now conveniently located in Kensington, on Gloucester Walk, a mere hour from the British Museum—which, as it happens, is displaying the excavated remains of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, an exhibit she feels he might enjoy Viewing?

So given that Downing believes he is at a point where he might safely break from his work without losing his sense of the aardvark’s jiva, given that he urgently needs to contact Skinner, given his longing to see Richard, his closest friend, Downing accepts the invitation, conveying to Lady Ostlet that she might expect him to arrive at their doorstep in two days, specifically, this Friday, noon.