“I want you to see Marr,” Julian replied, with a curious obstinacy.  He pushed up the trap in the roof.

“Drive to the European Hotel, in the Euston Road,” he said to the cabman.  “D’ you know it?”

“Yes, sir,” the cabman said.  He was smiling on his perch as he cracked his whip and drove towards the Circus.

The glass had been let down and the two friends beheld a continuously blurred prospect of London framed in racing raindrops and intersected by the wooden framework of the movable shutter.  It was at the same time fantastic and tumultuous.  The glare of light at the Circus shone over the everlasting procession of converging omnibuses, the everlasting mob of prostitutes and of respectable citizens waiting to mount into the vehicles whose paint proclaimed their destination.  Active walkers darted dexterously to and fro over the cobblestones, occasionally turning sharply to swear at a driver whose cab had bespattered their black conventionality with clinging dirt.  The drivers were impassively insulting, as became men placed for the moment in a high station of life.  At the door of the Criterion Restaurant an enormously fat and white bookmaker in a curly hat and diamonds muttered remarks into the ear of an unshaven music-hall singer.  A gigantic “chucker-out” observed them with the dull gaze of sullen habit, and a beggar-boy whined to them in vain for alms, then fluttered into obscurity.  Fixed with corner stones upon the wet pavement of the “island” lay in an unwinking row the contents bill of the evening papers, proclaiming in gigantic black or red letters the facts of suicide, slander, divorce, murder, railway accidents, fires, and war complications.  Dreary men read them with dreary, unexcited eyes, then forked out halfpence to raucous youths whose arms were full of damp sheets of pink paper.  A Guardsman kissed “good-bye” to his trembling sweetheart as he chivalrously assisted her into a Marylebone ’bus, and two shop-girls, going home from work, nudged each other and giggled hysterically.  Four fat Frenchmen stood in the porch of the Monico violently gesticulating and talking volubly at the tops of their voices.  Two English undergraduates pushed past them with a look of contempt, and went speechlessly into the café beyond.  A lady from Paris, all red velvet and white ostrich-tips, smoothed her cheek with her kid glove meditatively, and glanced about in search of her fate of the dark and silent hours.  And then—­Valentine and Julian were in the comparative dimness of Shaftesbury Avenue—­a huge red cross on a black background started out of the gloom above a playhouse.  Julian shuddered at it visibly.

“You are quite unstrung to-night, Julian,” Valentine said.  “Let us turn the cab round and go home.”

“No, no, my dear fellow; I am all right.  It is only that I see things to-night much more clearly than usual.  I suppose it is owing to something physical that every side of London seems to have sprung into prominence.  Of course I go about every day in Piccadilly, St. James’s Street, everywhere; but it is as if my eyes had been always shut, and now they are open.  I can see London to-night.  And that cross looked so devilishly ironical up there, as if it were silently laughing at the tumult in the rain.  Don’t you feel London to-night, too, Valentine?”