illusion that he was being interpenetrated with light, and the loveliness that he had thought of as Ellen seemed now only a richly coloured film blown round the fact of her.  If he wanted to hold her close to him it was only that he might shatter these frail substances with a harsh embrace and let their liberated souls stream out like comets’ hair.  There followed a moment when wisdom seemed to crackle like a lit fire in his head.  The plan of the universe lay set out among the coins on the table, and he looked down on it and said, “Of course!” But immediately he had forgotten why he had said it.  The world was the same again.  And Ellen was sitting there on the other side of the table, and she seemed very real.

She murmured petulantly, “I can’t remember a thing mother said....  I can’t remember what I’ve got to buy,” and swept the money into her pocket.  She was fatigued and blinded, as though all day she had watched a procession of burnished armies passing in strong sunlight.  “Let’s go on,” she said, and while he found his hat and coat in the lobby she went and stood in the garden, ringing her heels on the cold stone of the path, drinking in the iced air, abandoning herself to the chill of the evening as if it were a refuge from him.

But they were happy almost at once.  Like all clever adolescents, she had a mind like a rag-bag full of scraps of silks and satins and calicoes and old bits of ribbon which was constantly bursting and scattering a trail of allusions that were irrelevant to the occasion of their appearance, and so when he came to her side she began talking about George Borrow.  Didn’t he love “Lavengro,” him being a traveller?  And had he ever seen a prize-fight?  Oh, Yaverland had.  He had even had the privilege of crossing the Atlantic in the cattleboat ss.  Glory with Jim Corraway, since known to fame as Cardiff Jim.  But he broke it to her that now many of the best boxers were Jew lads from the East End of London, and not a few came from the special schools for the feeble-minded; feeble-mindedness often gave a man the uncloudable temper that makes a good boxer.

So, chattering like that, they came to the business of shopping.  It was, he thought, an extravagantly charming business.  As well as any other place on earth did he like this homely street, with its little low shops that sent into the frosty air savoury smells of what they sold, and took the chill off the moonlight with their yellow gas-jets.  He liked its narrow pavements thronged with shaggy terrier-like people who walked briskly on short legs; he liked its cobbled roadway, along which passed at intervals tramcars that lumbered along more slowly than any other trams in the world, with an air of dignity which intimated that their slowness was due to no mechanical defect, but to a sagacity which was aware that in this simple town nobody was doing anything more urgent than going home to supper.