Out in the corridor at the back of the dress circle people were beginning to circulate, relieved from the tension of examining the ballet.  Julian was instantly swallowed up in a noisy crowd, hot, flushed, loud-voiced, bright-eyed.  Masses of excited young men lounged to and fro, smoking cigarettes, and making fervent remarks upon the gaily dressed women, who glided among them observantly.  From the adjoining bar rose the music of popping corks and flowing liquids.  The barmaids were besieged.  Clouds of smoke hung in the air, and the heat was terrific.  Julian felt it clinging to him as if with human arms as he slowly walked over the thick carpet, glancing about him.  Humanity touched him on every side.  At one moment an elderly woman, with yellow hair and a fat-lined face, enveloped him in her skirts of scarlet and black striped silk.  The black chiffon that swept about her neck and heaving shoulders fluttered against his face.  Her high-heeled boots trod on his.  He seemed one with her.  Then she had vanished, and instantly he was in the arms of a huge racing-man, who wore gigantic pink pearls in his shirt front, and bellowed the latest slang to a thin and dissipated companion.  It seemed to Julian that he was kicked like a football from one life to another, and that from each life he drew away something as he bounded from it, the fragment of a thought, the thrill of a desire, the indrawn breath of a hope.  Like a machine that winds in threads of various coloured silks, he wound in threads from the various coloured hearts about him,—­red, white, coarse, and fine.  And, half-unconsciously, was he not weaving them into a fabric?  Never before had he understood the meaning of a crowd, that strange congregation of passions and of fates which speaks in movements and is melodious in attitudes, which quarrels in all its parts, silently, yet is swayed through and through by large impulses, and as an intellect far more keen and assertively critical than the intellect of any one person in it.  And now, when Julian began to feel the meaning of this surging mob of men and women, the hours danced, and he and all the crowd danced with them.  And the music that accompanied and directed the feet through the figures of that night’s quadrille was the music of words and of laughter, of hissing enticements and of whispered replies.  Irresistible was the performance of the hours and of the crowd that lived in them.  Julian knew it when the dance began, marvelled at it for a little when the dance was ended.  There was contagion in the air, furtive, but strong as the contagion of cholera,—­the contagion of human creatures gathered together in the night.  Only the youth who dwells—­like Will-o’-the-Mill—­forever by the lonely stream in the lonely mountain valley escapes it entirely.  Aged saints look backward on their lives, and remember at least one night when it seized them in its embrace; and even the purest woman, through its spell, has caught sight of the vision behind the veil of our civilization, and although she has shrunk from it, has had a moment of wonder and of interest, never quite effaced from her memory.