Bill Brauer The Gold Dress painting

Bill Brauer The Gold Dress paintingUnknown Artist Pink Floyd Back Catalogue paintingClaude Monet Water Lilies painting
that if two riot-troopers were guarding the Catalogue Room, whole platoons must be on duty in the main lobby, especially at the lifts that serviced Belfry and Belly. Somewhere overhead the clock once again struck the three-quarter-hour; unless it was in error, there was no time to waste debating with a phalanx of bayonets. I retraced my steps to the Circulation Room (no one seemed to be pursuing me) and having noticed from a corner of my eye a few moments earlier its single occupant -- a longhaired pallid girl, un-cosmeticked and -washed, reading behind a desk markedINFORMATION -- I took a long hazard.
"Excuse me, miss: is there any way up besides the lift?"
Next door the scholars fussed and clamored, scrambling after fragments on all fours like awkward kids, but the Circulation Room was still. The pimpled maid, thin and udderless as Mrs. Rexford but infinitely less prepossessing, looked over her spectacles from the large novel she was involved in and said with careful clarity -- as if that question, from a fleeced goat-boy at just that moment, were exactly what she'd expected -- "Yes. A stairway goes up to the Clockworks from this floor. You may enter it through the little door behind me."