“I hope you’ll never find it,” said Jay crossly.  She announced Ludgate Circus in a startling voice, and ended the conversation.

She was tired because she had been up all night among distressed friends in the Brown Borough.  There had been a fight in Tann Street.  Mrs. O’Rourke had broken the face of little Mrs. Love.  Mrs. Love had never fought before; her fists were like lamb cutlets, and she had had a good mother with non-combatant principles.  All these things are drawbacks in a Brown Borough argument.  But Mrs. Love was a friend of Jay’s, and I don’t think she had found that a drawback.  Feverish discussions with dreadfully impartial policemen, feverish drying of feverish tears, feverish extracting of medicaments from closed chemists, and finally a feverish triumph of words with which Jay capped Mrs. O’Rourke’s triumph of fists were the items in the sum of a feverish night.  So Jay was tired.

* * * * *

Mr. Russell was too early for his business, and he went into St. Paul’s and sat on a seat far back.

St. Paul was an anti-saint, I think, who very badly needed to get married and be answered back now and then.  I believe it is possible that he was unworthy of that great house called by his name.  The gospel of a very splendid detachment speaks within its walls, its windows turn inward, its music sings to itself.  Tossed City sinners go in and out, and pass, and penetrate, but still the music dreams, and still the dim gold blinks above their heads.  A muffled God walks the aisles, and you, in the bristling wilderness of chairs, can clutch at His skirts and never see His eyes.  Nothing comes forward from that altar to meet you.  It is as if He walked talking to Himself, and as if even His speech were lost in those devouring spaces.

Mr. Russell sat near the door, and found only his thoughts and the shuffle of seeking feet to keep him company.

“An Older and Wiser Man ...” he thought.  “God forgive me for letting it pass.”

If he had thought it worth while to profess an “ism” at all, he would have been a fatalist.  He was the victim of an unwitty cynicism, and of a heavy irresponsibility.  He applied either “It isn’t worth while” or “It doesn’t matter” to everything.  He never expressed his thoughts to himself—­it was not worth while,—­but I think he knew within himself that life was made of paper, and thrown together in a crackling chaos.  There was no depth in anything, and a mere thought could slay the highest thing in the world.  The only thing that ever made his heart laugh was the idea of fineness finding place in himself.  A dream of himself in a heroic light sometimes made him poke himself in the ribs, and mock the farce of human vanity.  He was like a man in a world that lacked mirrors, a man who sees his dark deformed shadow on the sands, and thinks it represents him fairly.