That same night, after working at a Report on the present Laws of Bankruptcy, which he was then drawing up, Stephen entered the joint apartment with excessive caution, having first made all his dispositions, and, stealing to the bed, slipped into it.  He lay there, offering himself congratulations that he had not awakened Cecilia, and Cecilia, who was wide awake, knew by his unwonted carefulness that he had come to some conclusion which he did not wish to impart to her.  Devoured, therefore, by disquiet, she lay sleepless till the clock struck two.

The conclusion to which Stephen had come was this:  Having twice gone through the facts—­Hilary’s corporeal separation from Bianca (communicated to him by Cecilia), cause unknowable; Hilary’s interest in the little model, cause unknown; her known poverty; her employment by Mr. Stone; her tenancy of Mrs. Hughs’ room; the latter’s outburst to Cecilia; Hughs’ threat; and, finally, the girl’s pretty clothes—­he had summed it up as just a common “plant,” to which his brother’s possibly innocent, but in any case imprudent, conduct had laid him open.  It was a man’s affair.  He resolutely tried to look on the whole thing as unworthy of attention, to feel that nothing would occur.  He failed dismally, for three reasons.  First, his inherent love of regularity, of having everything in proper order; secondly, his ingrained mistrust of and aversion from Bianca; thirdly, his unavowed conviction, for all his wish to be sympathetic to them, that the lower classes always wanted something out of you.  It was a question of how much they would want, and whether it were wise to give them anything.  He decided that it would not be wise at all.  What then?  Impossible to say.  It worried him.  He had a natural horror of any sort of scandal, and he was very fond of Hilary.  If only he knew the attitude Bianca would take up!  He could not even guess it.

Thus, on that Saturday afternoon, the 4th of May, he felt for once such a positive aversion from the reading of reviews, as men will feel from their usual occupations when their nerves have been disturbed.  He stayed late at Chambers, and came straight home outside an omnibus.

The tide of life was flowing in the town.  The streets were awash with wave on wave of humanity, sucked into a thousand crossing currents.  Here men and women were streaming out from the meeting of a religious congress, there streaming in at the gates of some social function; like bright water confined within long shelves of rock and dyed with myriad scales of shifting colour, they thronged Rotten Row, and along the closed shop-fronts were woven into an inextricable network of little human runlets.  And everywhere amongst this sea of men and women could be seen their shadows, meandering like streaks of grey slime stirred up from the lower depths by some huge, never-ceasing finger.  The innumerable roar of that human sea climbed out above the roofs and trees, and somewhere in illimitable space blended, and slowly reached the meeting-point of sound and silence—­that Heart where Life, leaving its little forms and barriers, clasps Death, and from that clasp springs forth new-formed, within new barriers.