[1] Cow-house.

THE PARADISE OF CHOICE.

It was not as in certain toy houses that foretell the weather by means of a man-doll and a woman-doll—­the man going in as the woman comes out, and vice versa.  In this case both man and woman stepped out, the man half a minute behind; so that the woman was almost at the street-corner while he hesitated just outside the door, blinking up at the sky, and then dropping his gaze along the pavement.

The sky was flattened by a fog that shut down on the roofs and chimneys like a tent-cloth, white and opaque.  Now and then a yellowish wave rolled across it from eastward, and the cloth would be shaken.  When this happened, the street was always filled with gloom, and the receding figure of the woman lost in it for a while.

The man thrust a hand into his trousers pocket, pulled out a penny, and after considering for a couple of seconds, spun it carelessly.  It fell in his palm, tail up; and he regarded it as a sailor might a compass.  The trident in Britannia’s hand pointed westward, down the street.

“West it is,” he decided with a shrug, implying that all the four quarters were equally to his mind.  He was pocketing the coin, when footsteps approached, and he lifted his head.  It was the woman returning.  She halted close to him with an undecided manner, and the pair eyed each other.

We may know them as Adam and Eve, for both were beginning a world that contained neither friends nor kin.  Both had very white hands and very short hair.  The man was tall and meagre, with a receding forehead and a sandy complexion that should have been freckled, but was not.  He had a trick of half-closing his eyes when he looked at anything, not screwing them up as seamen do, but appearing rather to drop a film over them like the inner eyelid of a bird.  The woman’s eyes resembled a hare’s, being brown and big, and set far back, so that she seemed at times to be looking right behind her.  She wore a faded look, from her dust-coloured hair to her boots, which wanted blacking.

“It all seems so wide,” she began; “so wide—­”

“I’m going west,” said the man, and started at a slow walk.  Eve followed, a pace behind his heels, treading almost in his tracks.  He went on, taking no notice of her.

“How long were you in there?” she asked, after a while.

“Ten year’.”  Adam spoke without looking back. “’Cumulated jobs, you know.”

“I was only two.  Blankets it was with me.  They recommended me to mercy.”

“You got it,” Adam commented, with his eyes fastened ahead.

The fog followed them as they turned into a street full of traffic.  Its frayed edge rose and sank, was parted and joined again—­now descending to the first-storey windows and blotting out the cabmen and passengers on omnibus tops, now rolling up and over the parapets of the houses and the sky-signs.  It was noticeable that in the crowd that hustled along the pavement Adam moved like a puppy not yet waywise, but with lifted face, while Eve followed with her head bent, seeing nothing but his heels.  She observed that his boots were hardly worn at all.