’We’ll drop down on them, find our hotel, and have a look at what they’re doing,’ he said, and stepped.

Woodseer would gladly have remained.  The starlit black ridges about him and the dragon’s mouth yawing underneath were an opposition of spiritual and mundane; innocent, noxious; exciting to the youthful philosopher.  He had to follow, and so rapidly in the darkness that he stumbled and fell on an arm; a small matter.

Bed-chambers awaited them at the hotel, none of the party:  and Fleetwood’s man-servant was absent.

‘Gambling, the rascal!’ he said.  Woodseer heard the first note of the place in that.

His leader was washed, neatly dressed, and knocking at his door very soon, impatient to be off, and he flung a promise of ‘supper presently’ to one whose modest purse had fallen into a debate with this lordly hostelry, counting that a supper and a night there would do for it.  They hurried on to the line of promenaders, a river of cross-currents by the side of seated groups; and the willowy swish of silken dresses, feminine perfumery, cigar-smoke, chatter, laughter, told of pleasure reigning.

Fleetwood scanned the groups.  He had seen enough in a moment and his face blackened.  A darting waiter was called to him.

He said to Woodseer, savagely, as it sounded:  ’You shall have something to joint your bones!’ What cause of wrath he had was past a guess:  a wolf at his vitals bit him, hardening his handsome features.

The waiter darted back, bearing a tray and tall glasses filled each with piled parti-coloured liqueurs, on the top of which an egg-yolk swam.  Fleetwood gave example.  Swallowing your egg, the fiery-velvet triune behind slips after it, in an easy milky way, like a princess’s train on a state-march, and you are completely, transformed, very agreeably; you have become a merry demon.  ‘Well, yes, it’s next to magic,’ he replied to Woodseer’s astonished snigger after the draught, and explained, that it was a famous Viennese four-of-the-morning panacea, the revellers’ electrical restorer.  ’Now you can hold on for an hour or two, and then we’ll sup.  At Rome?’

‘Ay!  Druids to-morrow!’ cried the philosopher bewitched.

He found himself bowing to a most heavenly lady, composed of day and night in her colouring, but more of night, where the western edge has become a pale steel blade.  Men were around her, forming a semi-circle.  The world of men and women was mere timber and leafage to this flower of her sex, glory of her kind.  How he behaved in her presence, he knew not; he was beyond self-criticism or conscious reflection; simply the engine of the commixed three liqueurs, with parlous fine thoughts, and a sense of steaming into the infinite.