The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street by Helene Hanff

and got to page 3, when I hit a snag:
    Milton assumed I’d read the Christian version of Isaiah and the New Testament and had learned all about Lucifer and the War in Heaven, and since I’d been reared in Judaism I hadn’t. So I said, “Wait here,” and borrowed a Christian Bible and read about Lucifer and so forth, and then went back to Milton and read Paradise Lost , and then finally got back to Q, page 3. On page 4 or 5, I discovered that the point of the sentence at the top of the page was in Latin and the long quotation at the bottom of the page was in Greek. So I advertised in the Saturday Review for somebody to teach me Latin and Greek, and went back to Q meanwhile, and discovered he assumed I not only knew all the plays of Shakespeare, and Boswell’s Johnson , but also the Second book of Esdras, which is not in the Old Testament and not in the New Testament, it’s in the Apocrypha, which is a set of books nobody had ever thought to tell me existed.
    So what with one thing and another and an average of three “Wait here’s” a week, it took me eleven years to get through Q’s five books of lectures.
    Q also introduced me to John Henry Newman, who taught at Oriel, Oxford, and when I finish with Trinity I’mgoing over to Oriel and sit in John Henry’s chapel and tell him I still don’t know what he was talking about most of the time but I’ve got whole pages of the Apologia by heart, and I own a first edition of The Idea of a University.

Sunday, June 27
    PB is right, the Royal Chapel at Marlborough is not at all touristy and few people know it’s open to the public. If it is.
    I dressed very carefully and went down there this morning. Only a handful of people attended the service. All of them obviously worship there every Sunday, all of them obviously know each other and all of them spent most of the service trying to figure out who I was. From the whispers and sidelong glances you could reconstruct the dialogue:
    â€œMy dear, don’t look now . . .”
    â€œ. . . back there on the end pew, a few rows behind . . .”
    Bzz-bzz-bzz.
    One angular, elderly lady got out her spectacles just to have a good long squint at me. Then she turned to the wispy friend sitting next to her and shook her head “No!” firmly. The wispy lady refused to be daunted. She kept staring at me with the tentative half-smile you use when you know the face but just can’t place it. I made the mistake of smiling back, and from then on neither of them took their eyes off me.
    I was also the only shoulder bag in the house, if I have to add that.
    At the end of the service I was the first one up the aisle and out of there.
    Had to come back up here for lunch. NOTHING is open here on Sunday, you could starve.

Afternoon
    I’m lying under a tree in St. James’s Park. There are three downtown parks adjoining each other—St. James’s and Green, both small, and the big one, Hyde Park.
    All the parks here are very serene, very gentle. Young couples go by, arm in arm, quietly, no transistor radios or guitars in hand. Families picnic on the lawn sedately. Dogs go by on leashes, equally sedate, looking neither to the right nor to the left. There was one exception: a woman came by with a small gray poodle on a leash, I said hello to the poodle and he veered toward me, always-glad-to-meet-a-friend, but the woman yanked him back.
    â€œPlease don’t do that!” she said to me sharply. “I’m trying to teach him good manners.”
    I thought, “A pity he can’t do the same for you,” and had a sudden vision of Dog Hill on a Sunday afternoon and wondered how everybody was.
    We had a picnic there one night—Dick, who lives in my building and owns an English sheep dog, and my friend Nikki and I. I had some cold turkey for sandwiches and I deviled some eggs, and Dick made a thermos of bloody marys and we went over to the hill with