Mike laughed and chattered of everything.  Words came from him like flour from a mill.

The Pilgrim was published on Wednesday.  Wednesday was the day, therefore, for walking in the Park; for lunching out; for driving in hansoms.  Like a fish on the crest of a wave he surveyed London—­multitudinous London, circulating about him; and he smiled with pleasure when he caught sight of trees spreading their summer green upon the curling whiteness of the clouds.  He loved the Park.  The Park had always been his friend; it had given him society when no door was open to him; it had been the inspiration of all his ambitions; it was the Park that had first showed him ladies and gentlemen in all the gaud and charm of town leisure.  There he had seen for the first time the panorama of slanting sunshades, patent leather shoes, horses cantering in the dusty sunlight, or proudly grouped, the riders flicking the flies away with gold-headed whips.  He loved the androgynous attire of the horsewomen—­collars, silk hats, and cravats.  The Park appealed to him intensely and strangely as nothing else did.  He loved the Park for the great pasture it afforded to his vanity.  It was in the Park he saw the fashionable procuress driving—­she who would not allow him to pay even for champagne in her house; it was in the Park he met the little actress who looked so beseechingly in his face; it was in the Park he met fashionable ladies who asked him to dinner and took him to the theatre; it was in the Park he had found life and fortune, and, saturated with happiness, with health, tingling with consciousness of his happiness, Mike passed among the various crowd, which in its listlessness seemed to balance and air itself like a many-petalled flower.  But much as the crowd amused and pleased him, he was more amused and pleased with the present vision of his own personality, which in a long train of images and stories passed within him.  He loved to dream of himself; in dreams he entered his soul like a temple, seeing himself in various environment, and acting in manifold circumstances.

“Here am I—­a poor boy from the bogs of Ireland—­poor people” (the reflection was an unpleasant one, and he escaped from it); “at all events a poor boy without money or friends.  I have made myself what I am....  I get the best of everything—­women, eating, clothes; I live in beautiful rooms surrounded with pretty things.  True, they are not mine, but what does that matter?—­I haven’t the bother of looking after them....  If I could only get rid of that cursed accent, but I haven’t much; Escott has nearly as much, and he was brought up at an English school.  How pleasant it is to have money!  Heigho!  How pleasant it is to have money!  Six pounds a week from the paper, and I could make easily another four if I chose.  Sometimes I don’t get any presents; women seem as if they were going to chuck it up, and then they send all things—­money, jewelry, and comestibles.  I am sure it was Ida who sent that hundred pounds.  What should I do if it ever came out?  But there’s nothing to come out.  I believe I am suspected, but nothing can be proved against me.