the brown moustache and the nickel buttons, had also come on a flying ship.  He merely let his mind float in an endless felicity about the man.  He thought how nice it would be if he had to live up in that gallery with that one man for ever.  He thought how he would luxuriate in the nameless shades of this man’s soul and then hear with an endless excitement about the nameless shades of the souls of all his aunts and uncles.  A moment before he had been dying alone.  Now he was living in the same world with a man; an inexhaustible ecstasy.  In the gallery below the ball Father Michael had found that man who is the noblest and most divine and most lovable of all men, better than all the saints, greater than all the heroes—­man Friday.

In the confused colour and music of his new paradise, Michael heard only in a faint and distant fashion some remarks that this beautiful solid man seemed to be making to him; remarks about something or other being after hours and against orders.  He also seemed to be asking how Michael “got up” there.  This beautiful man evidently felt as Michael did that the earth was a star and was set in heaven.

At length Michael sated himself with the mere sensual music of the voice of the man in buttons.  He began to listen to what he said, and even to make some attempt at answering a question which appeared to have been put several times and was now put with some excess of emphasis.  Michael realized that the image of God in nickel buttons was asking him how he had come there.  He said that he had come in Lucifer’s ship.  On his giving this answer the demeanour of the image of God underwent a remarkable change.  From addressing Michael gruffly, as if he were a malefactor, he began suddenly to speak to him with a sort of eager and feverish amiability as if he were a child.  He seemed particularly anxious to coax him away from the balustrade.  He led him by the arm towards a door leading into the building itself, soothing him all the time.  He gave what even Michael (slight as was his knowledge of the world) felt to be an improbable account of the sumptuous pleasures and varied advantages awaiting him downstairs.  Michael followed him, however, if only out of politeness, down an apparently interminable spiral of staircase.  At one point a door opened.  Michael stepped through it, and the unaccountable man in buttons leapt after him and pinioned him where he stood.  But he only wished to stand; to stand and stare.  He had stepped as it were into another infinity, out under the dome of another heaven.  But this was a dome of heaven made by man.  The gold and green and crimson of its sunset were not in the shapeless clouds but in shapes of cherubim and seraphim, awful human shapes with a passionate plumage.  Its stars were not above but far below, like fallen stars still in unbroken constellations; the dome itself was full of darkness.  And far below, lower even than the lights, could be seen creeping or motionless, great black masses of men.  The tongue of a terrible organ seemed to shake the very air in the whole void; and through it there came up to Michael the sound of a tongue more terrible; the dreadful everlasting voice of man, calling to his gods from the beginning to the end of the world.  Michael felt almost as if he were a god, and all the voices were hurled at him.