But I have not yet taken you to the very hearth and centre of the whole establishment, the nursery, I mean, and the nursery passage. Take my hand, and let me pilot you carefully, for our way lies up the back stairs, which are full of perils. That door we pass is the one room in the house which children are not allowed to enter: that click-clicking noise you hear is Daddy playing billiards, all in a great room that is used for no other purpose. In front of us lies the linen cupboard, where there is a bogy who jumps out if you do not run past it quickly. And here (be careful!) the stairs are at their narrowest just where you can reach the friendly aid of the banisters. Now, open the swing-door, and there is the nursery passage in front of you! I would explain to you the use of that “pogo-stick” in the corner if you were not already tired of my _fin de siècle_ reminiscences.... Yes, that is a model of a Handley Page, only it does not work now, and the split-nosed, pasty-faced pilot sits there and will ever sit, looking a fool, in enforced inaction. The badger in the glass case was caught on these grounds—a badger! You would be no less incredulous if I had called it a hyena. That chart on the wall was a picture of the “Western Front” in 1916—come away, you cannot recapture the thrill of those old battles.... And here we are at the nursery door itself.
Yes, that is my dolls’ house. No, there is no bath-room, no garage, no electric light laid on. The front wall, I am sorry to say, opens all in one piece, so that you cannot pay a call without discovering Esmeralda, if luck will so have it, at her toilet upstairs. There is no lift, and the staircase does not really pierce through the ground floor ceiling. And yet, I do not fancy that I was very much less happy, or very much less proud, when I showed off this thin-walled, vermilion-bricked affair to my aunts than my friends can be when I inspect their more elaborate and more realistic dolls’ flats. It is the spirit, after all, not the apparatus that matters. And that is my toy train, running round the ottoman. I do not know that its cardboard passengers wave their cardboard hats any the less enthusiastically because it is only common electricity, of an inferior voltage, that drives it round those terrifying loops. That is a “Teddy” bear, named after a once great predecessor of President O’Shaugnessy. But enough! I would not have brought you to see my toys, so sacred are they, if I had known you would curl your lip so disdainfully. Let me fish for a moment under the seat, and bring out something that will make your mouth water and leave you envious—yes, here it is ... the stamp album!