e for him the union that
already he was aware of coveting. Alan was rosy with the joy of life on
the slopes of the world, and Stella must surely have always someone
fresh and clean and straight like Alan to marvel at her.

"By Jove, she must have frightfully strong wrists and fingers," said
Alan.

Just so, thought Michael, might a shepherd marvel at a lark's powerful
wings.

April went her course that year with less of sweet uncertainty than
usual, and Michael walked very often along the Embankment dreaming in
the sunshine as day by day, almost hour by hour, the trees were
greening. Chelsea appealed to his sense of past greatness. It pleased
him to feel that Carlyle and Rossetti might have walked as he was
walking now during some dead April of time. Moreover, such heroes were
not too far away. Their landscape was conceivable. People who had known
them well were still alive. Swinburne and Meredith, too, had walked
here, and themselves were still alive. In Carlington Road there had been
none of this communion with the past. Nobody outside the contemporary
residents could ever have walked along its moderately cheerful
uniformity.

Michael, as he pondered the satisfaction which had come from the change
of residence, began to feel a sentimental curiosity about Carlington
Road and its surrounding streets. It was not yet a year since he had
existed there familiarly, almost indigenously; but the combination of
Oxford and Cheyne Walk made him feel a lifetime had passed since he had
been so willingly transplanted. One morning late in April and just
before he was going up for the summer term, he determined to pay a visit
to the scenes of his childhood. It was an experience more depressing
than he had imagined it would be. He was shocked by the sensation of
constraint and of slightly contemptible limitation that was imposed upon
his fancy by the pilgrimage. He thought to himself, as he wandered
between the rows of thin red houses, that after the freedom of the river
Carlington Road was purely intolerable. It did not possess the
narrowness that lent a mysterious intimacy. The two rows of houses did
not lean over and meet one another as houses lean over, almost seeming
to gossip with one another, in ancient towns. They gave rather the
impression of two mutually unattractive entities propelled into
contiguity by the inexorable economy of the life around. The two rows
came together solely for the purpose of crowding together a num