both athletic, and even gymnastic; Inglewood through his
concern for hygiene, and Moon through his concern for sport, which was
not quite so idle and inactive as that of the average sportsman.
Also they both had a light-headed burst of celestial sensation when
the door was burst in the roof, as if a door had been burst in the sky,
and they could climb out on to the very roof of the universe.
They were both men who had long been unconsciously imprisoned in
the commonplace, though one took it comically, and the other seriously.
They were both men, nevertheless, in whom sentiment had never died.
But Mr. Moses Gould had an equal contempt for their suicidal athletics
and their subconscious transcendentalism, and he stood and laughed
at the thing with the shameless rationality of another race.

When the singular Smith, astride of a chimney-pot, learnt that Gould
was not following, his infantile officiousness and good nature
forced him to dive back into the attic to comfort or persuade;
and Inglewood and Moon were left alone on the long gray-green
ridge of the slate roof, with their feet against gutters and their
backs against chimney-pots, looking agnostically at each other.
Their first feeling was that they had come out into eternity,
and that eternity was very like topsy-turvydom. One definition
occurred to both of them--that he had come out into the light
of that lucid and radiant ignorance in which all beliefs had begun.
The sky above them was full of mythology. Heaven seemed deep
enough to hold all the gods. The round of the ether turned
from green to yellow gradually like a great unripe fruit.
All around the sunken sun it was like a lemon; round all the east it
was a sort of golden green, more suggestive of a greengage; but the whole
had still the emptiness of daylight and none of the secrecy of dusk.
Tumbled here and there across this gold and pale green were
shards and shattered masses of inky purple cloud, which seemed
falling towards the earth in every kind of colossal perspective.
One of them really had the character of some many-mitred,
many-bearded, many-winged Assyrian image, huge head downwards,
hurled out of heaven--a sort of false Jehovah, who was perhaps Satan.
All the other clouds had preposterous pinnacled shapes, as if the god's
palaces had been flung after him.

And yet, while the empty heaven was full of silent catastrophe, the height
of human buildings above which they sat held here and there a tin