“It’s the sort of thought that would, my son,” opined Carminow.

“But you can’t deny I’m right.  No clinging drapery has ever been so suggestive, so much the refinement of sensuality, as the crinoline.”

Ishmael said nothing; but inwardly he too felt what Killigrew meant, which he would not have done a week earlier.  As he sat there, warm and pleasantly stung by the wine he had drunk, the brightness of the scene and the colour of the music and the thoughts they conjured up, as well as the gowns and head-dresses of the pretty women, all awaked in him the glow a child feels at its first pantomime.  The dancers were to him not flesh-and-blood women, but magical creatures, and yet he was stirred to a new excitement too.  As he sat there all the sense of poise with which he usually so confidently faced the affairs of life, and which, far from failing him, generally served him only too well, began to sway and grow many-coloured.

When they went out into the street again he agreed with Carminow that the night was yet too young to abandon it in mid-air.  He did not, however, feel like more drinks; the exhilaration of the play, of his own youth, now for the first time tingling unrestrainedly in his veins, the glamour of the gaily-lit night—­they had wandered as far as the Haymarket, which was ablaze till dawn—­were all enough for him, and he felt that anything more would have blurred their keenness.  Suddenly Carminow had an inspiration.

“Come back with me, you two,” he suggested.  “I’ve got quite decent digs in Cecil Stweet, off the Stwand.  And I’ve a little collection that might intewest you....”

“I know, monstrosities in bottles and side elevations of premature babies,” surmised Killigrew; “you’re a foul old thing!  But we’ll come and have a yarn over ’em anyway.  I’m not in a hurry to face my revered parents and I daren’t take this good little boy to some places you and I know of.  I’m responsible for him.”

Carminow turned a pessimistic eye on Ishmael.  “Are you still pure?” he shot at him in his deepest bass.  “I see you are; your look answers for you.”  And he strode on again.  He turned to add over his shoulder:  “I cannot in the intewests of my pwofession emulate you; it is incumbent on me to know first hand all that is possible, but I consider it an excellent thing for the layman.  Keep it up.  Don’t let Killigrew, who is a commonplace sinner, laugh you out of it.”

Ishmael forced himself to reply that he did not intend to forego his own ideas on the subject for Killigrew or anyone else; and, indeed, he was not so outraged by anything Carminow had said as by Killigrew’s whispered communication that for his part he believed Carminow was boasting....  “Don’t believe he knows the way,” added Killigrew, “or only theoretically.  He’s like a lot of doctors—­all theories and no practice.”  He was so pleased with this joke he had to repeat it aloud to Carminow, who bore it quite unruffled.