ilmot, making his pontifical and undulatory adieu, passed on.

"Silly ass!" said Michael to himself. "And he always thinks he knows
everything."

Michael turned out of the noisy main road into the sylvan urbanity of
Holland Walk. A haze of tender diaphanous green clung to the boles of
the smirched elms, softening the sooty decay that made their antiquity
so grotesque and so dishonourable. Michael sat down for a while on a
bench, inhaling the immemorial perfume of a London spring and listening
to the loud courtship of the blackbirds in the ragged shrubberies that
lined the railings of Holland Park. He was not made any the more content
with himself by this effluence of revivified effort that impregnated
the air around him. He was out of harmony with every impulse of the
season, and felt just as tightly fettered now as long ago he used to
feel on waits by this same line of blackened trees with Nurse to quell
his lightest step towards freedom. Where was Nurse now? The pungent
odour of privet blown along a dying wind of March was quick with old
memories of forbidden hiding-places, and he looked up, half expectant of
her mummified shape peering after his straying steps round the gnarled
and blackened trunk of the nearest elm. Michael rose quickly and went on
his way towards Notting Dale. This Holland Walk had always been a
haunted spot, not at all a place to hearten one, especially where at the
top it converged to a silent passage between wooden palings whose
twinkling interstices and exudations of green slime had always been
queerly sinister. Even now Michael was glad when he could hear again the
noise of traffic in the Bayswater Road. As he walked on towards Mr.
Viner's house he gave rein to fanciful moralizings upon these two great
roads on either side of the Park that ran a parallel course, but never
met. How foreign it all seemed on this side with unfamiliar green
omnibuses instead of red, with never even a well-known beggar or
pavement-artist. The very sky had an alien look, seeming vaster somehow
than the circumscribed clouds of Kensington. Perhaps after all the
people of this intolerably surprizing city were not so much to be blamed
for their behaviour during a period of war. They had nothing to hold
them together, to teach them to endure and enjoy, to suffer and rejoice
in company. These great main roads sweeping West and East with
multitudinous chimney-pots between were symbolic of the whole muddle of
existence.