And seeing the people in the streets as she drove past, she wondered if they were as happy as she was.  She speculated on their errands, and wondered if many of the women were going, like her, to their lovers.  She wondered what their lovers were like, and she laughed at her thoughts.  Seeing that she was passing through a very mean street, she hoped that Ulick’s rooms were not too Bohemian, and felt relieved when she found that the street she dreaded led into a square.  A square, she reflected, always means a certain measure of respectability.  And the faded, old-fashioned neighbourhood pleased her.  Some of the houses seemed as if they had known more fashionable days; and the square exhaled a tender melancholy; it suggested a vision of dreamy lives—­lives lived in ideas, lives of students who lived in books unaware of the externality of things.

But the cabman could not find the number, and Evelyn impatiently inquired it from the vagrant children.  There were groups of them on the wide doorstep, and Evelyn imagined the interior of the house, wide passages, gently-sloping staircase, its heavy banisters.  It surprised and amused her to find that she had imagined it quite correctly; and when she reached the landing to which she had been directed, she stopped, hearing his voice.  He was only talking to himself; she pushed the door and called to him.

“Oh, it is you?” he said; “you have come sooner than I expected.”

“Then you expected me, Ulick?”

“Yes, I expected you.”

“Expected me ...to-day!  But, Ulick, what were you saying when I came in?”

“Only some Kabbalistic formula,” he replied, quite naturally.

“But you don’t really believe in such superstitions, and it surely is very wrong.”

He looked at her incredulously, as he might at some beautiful apparition likely at any moment to vanish from his sight, then reverentially drew her towards him and kissed her.  Her hand was laid on his shoulder, and in a delicious apprehension she stood looking at him.

“Where shall we sit?”

He threw some books and papers from a long cane chair, and she lay down in it.  He sat on the arm, and then tried to talk.

“Let me take your hat.”

She unpinned it, and he placed it on the piano.

His room was lighted by two square windows looking on the open space in front of the square, where the vagrant children gathered in noisy groups round a dripping iron fountain.  The floor was covered with grey-green drugget, and near the fireplace, drawn in front of the window, was a large oak table covered with papers of various kinds.  Against the end wall there was a bookcase, and there were shelves filled with books.  There were two arm-chairs, a piano, and some prints of Blake’s illustrations to Dante on the wall.  The writing table, covered with manuscript music, roused Evelyn’s curiosity.  She glanced down a page of orchestration, and then picked up the first pages of an article, and having read them she said—­