But his thoughts did not so much as brush the treasures at which he stared, and neither the hurrying crowd—­which had a restless, workaday look at the morning hour—­nor the noisily clanging cars broke into the exquisitely reared castle of his dreams.  Since the evening before his imagination had been thrilling to the tune of some spirited music, flowing presumably from these airy towers, and as he went on over the wet sunlight on the sidewalk, he was still keeping step to the exalted if unreal measures.  Never in his life; not even in his wildest literary ecstasies, had he felt so assured of the beauty, of the bountifulness, of his coming years—­so filled with a swelling thankfulness for the mere physical fact of birth.  He was twenty-five, he believed passionately in his own powers, and he was, he told himself with emphasis, in love for the first and only time.  In the confused tangle of his fancy he saw Laura like some great white flower, growing out of reach, yet not entirely beyond endeavour, and the ladder that went up to her was made by his own immediate successes.  Then the footlights before his play swam in his picture and he heard already the applause of crowded houses and felt in his head the intoxication of his triumph.  Act by act, scene by scene, he rehearsed in fancy his great drama, seeing the players throng before the footlights and seeing, too, Laura applauding softly from a stage box at the side.  He had had moments of despondency over his idea, had grovelled in abject despair during trying periods of execution, but now all uncertainty—­all misgivings evaporated like an obscuring fog before a burst of light.  The light, indeed, had at the moment the full radiance of a great red glow such as he had seen used for effective purposes upon the stage—­and just as every object of scenery had taken, for the time, a portion of the transfiguring suffusion—­so now the external ugly details among which he moved were bathed in the high coloured light of his imagination.

But if the end is sometimes long in coming, it comes at last even to the visions of youth, and when his tired limbs finally dragged his soaring spirit to earth, he took a passing car and came home to luncheon.  The glamour had faded suddenly from his dreams, as if a bat’s wing had fluttered overhead, and in his new mood, he felt a resurgence of his old self-consciousness.  He was provoked by the suspicion that he had shown less as a coming dramatist than as a present fool, and he contrasted his own awkwardness with Adams’ whimsical ease of manner.  Did a woman ever forget how a man appeared when she first met him?  Would any amount of fame to-morrow obliterate from Laura’s memory his embarrassment of yesterday?  He had heard that the surface impression was what counted in the feminine mind, and this made him think enviously, for a minute, of Perry Bridewell—­of his handsome florid face and his pleasant animal magnetism.  Perry was stupid and an egoist, and yet he had heard that Mrs. Bridewell, for all her beauty and her wit, adored him, while he openly neglected her.  Was the secret of success, after all, simply an indifference to everyone’s needs except one’s own? or was it rather the courage to impress the world that one’s own were the only needs that counted?