Page:Chesterton - The Club of Queer Trades.djvu/287

The Seclusion of the Old Lady As I said, it was months after that Rupert Grant suddenly entered my room, swinging a satchel in his hand and with a general air of having jumped over the garden wall, and implored me to go with him upon the latest and wildest of his expeditions. He proposed to himself no less a thing than the discovery of the actual origin, whereabouts, and headquarters of the source of all our joys and sorrows—the Club of Queer Trades. I should expand this story forever if I explained how ultimately we ran this strange entity to its lair. The process meant a hundred interesting things—the tracking of a member, the bribing of a cabman, the fighting of roughs, the lifting of a paving-stone, the finding of a cellar, the finding of a cellar below the cellar, the finding of the subterranean passage, the finding of the Club of Queer Trades.

I have had many strange experiences in my life, but never a stranger one than that I felt when I came out of those rambling, sightless, and seemingly hopeless passages into the sudden splendor of a sumptuous 263