he thought it would be vulgar, never went to see them) and the passion of the stage seized him.  He felt a thrill the moment he got into the little, shabby, ill-lit theatre.  Soon he came to know the peculiarities of the small company, and by the casting could tell at once what were the characteristics of the persons in the drama; but this made no difference to him.  To him it was real life.  It was a strange life, dark and tortured, in which men and women showed to remorseless eyes the evil that was in their hearts:  a fair face concealed a depraved mind; the virtuous used virtue as a mask to hide their secret vice, the seeming-strong fainted within with their weakness; the honest were corrupt, the chaste were lewd.  You seemed to dwell in a room where the night before an orgy had taken place:  the windows had not been opened in the morning; the air was foul with the dregs of beer, and stale smoke, and flaring gas.  There was no laughter.  At most you sniggered at the hypocrite or the fool:  the characters expressed themselves in cruel words that seemed wrung out of their hearts by shame and anguish.

Philip was carried away by the sordid intensity of it.  He seemed to see the world again in another fashion, and this world too he was anxious to know.  After the play was over he went to a tavern and sat in the bright warmth with Hayward to eat a sandwich and drink a glass of beer.  All round were little groups of students, talking and laughing; and here and there was a family, father and mother, a couple of sons and a girl; and sometimes the girl said a sharp thing, and the father leaned back in his chair and laughed, laughed heartily.  It was very friendly and innocent.  There was a pleasant homeliness in the scene, but for this Philip had no eyes.  His thoughts ran on the play he had just come from.

“You do feel it’s life, don’t you?” he said excitedly.  “You know, I don’t think I can stay here much longer.  I want to get to London so that I can really begin.  I want to have experiences.  I’m so tired of preparing for life:  I want to live it now.”

Sometimes Hayward left Philip to go home by himself.  He would never exactly reply to Philip’s eager questioning, but with a merry, rather stupid laugh, hinted at a romantic amour; he quoted a few lines of Rossetti, and once showed Philip a sonnet in which passion and purple, pessimism and pathos, were packed together on the subject of a young lady called Trude.  Hayward surrounded his sordid and vulgar little adventures with a glow of poetry, and thought he touched hands with Pericles and Pheidias because to describe the object of his attentions he used the word hetaira instead of one of those, more blunt and apt, provided by the English language.  Philip in the daytime had been led by curiosity to pass through the little street near the old bridge, with its neat white houses and green shutters, in which according to Hayward the Fraulein Trude lived; but the women, with brutal faces