o accost and make friends. It is
a queer instinctive revolt from the narrow limited friendless homes in
which so many find themselves, a going out towards something, romance if
you will, beauty, that has suddenly become a need--a need that hitherto
has lain dormant and unsuspected. They promenade.

Vulgar!--it is as vulgar as the spirit that calls the moth abroad in the
evening and lights the body of the glow-worm in the night. I made my
way through the throng, a little contemptuously as became a public
schoolboy, my hands in my pockets--none of your cheap canes for me!--and
very careful of the lie of my cigarette upon my lips. And two girls
passed me, one a little taller than the other, with dim warm-tinted
faces under clouds of dark hair and with dark eyes like pools reflecting
stars.

I half turned, and the shorter one glanced back at me over her
shoulder--I could draw you now the pose of her cheek and neck and
shoulder--and instantly I was as passionately in love with the girl as
I have ever been before or since, as any man ever was with any woman. I
turned about and followed them, I flung away my cigarette ostentatiously
and lifted my school cap and spoke to them.

The girl answered shyly with her dark eyes on my face. What I said
and what she said I cannot remember, but I have little doubt it was
something absolutely vapid. It really did not matter; the thing was we
had met. I felt as I think a new-hatched moth must feel when suddenly
its urgent headlong searching brings it in tremulous amazement upon its
mate.

We met, covered from each other, with all the nets of civilisation
keeping us apart. We walked side by side.

It led to scarcely more than that. I think we met four or five times
altogether, and always with her nearly silent elder sister on the other
side of her. We walked on the last two occasions arm in arm, furtively
caressing each other's hands, we went away from the glare of the shops
into the quiet roads of villadom, and there we whispered instead of
talking and looked closely into one another's warm and shaded face.
"Dear," I whispered very daringly, and she answered, "Dear!" We had a
vague sense that we wanted more of that quality of intimacy and more. We
wanted each other as one wants beautiful music again or to breathe again
the scent of flowers.

And that is all there was between us. The events are nothing, the thing
that matters is the way in which this experience stabbed through the
co