ngs with friends.

Gina's terror, the wild night, the storm in the air, caught hold of
Betty with an insistent grip. The voice of the travailing earth played
on her strung nerves as if they had been banjo-strings. She smoked
cigarettes to still them; she tried to read, to ignore them.

A little after midnight the city shook with great definiteness. The room
quivered and rattled from floor to ceiling. Betty, after that, went out
into the streets, to see how things were, to meet other people, to find
Tommy, to escape her own society. The Crevequers were gregarious; they
on all occasions sought other people's society in preference to their
own.

Betty was in the fashion; every one seemed, upon that upheaval, to have
sought the open, more or less regardless of whether or not they were
clad suitably to face it. Some of them were not at all clad suitably;
they gave an impression of extreme haste. Close to Betty a stout lady in
a nightdress shivered, and clasped a whimpering pug in her arms.

There was an influx into the churches; there was crying and moaning and
telling of beads. An impromptu procession passed, bearing lighted
candles, and a wax San Gennaro lent from his altar by his _parocco_.

Meanwhile the mountain across the bay flung into the black night its
glowing masses. Above it hung an immense fiery pillar, blazing across
the dark, restless sea.

Vesuvius had not done yet.

Betty looked for Tommy.

She did not find him; she found instead Mrs. Venables, and thought, with
a vague, detached part of her mind, what an orgie this must be.

Mrs. Venables was not pleased with Betty, but the strikingness of the
present occasion seemed to unite them.

'Deeply impressive.... I suppose few of us have ever experienced such a
night.... I am going into the church.'

'I'm l-looking for Tommy,' Betty said mechanically, staring down the
street.

Mrs. Venables did not hear; she was borne away by the crowd, murmuring,
'The city of dreadful night,' the light of exaltation kindling her fine
plain face.

'But probably he's home by now,' Betty suddenly thought, and pressed a
way through the people to her own street, and climbed the black stairs
to the small room, where the lamp flickered dimly and nothing else
moved.

Betty huddled again into her own arm-chair, and rested her chin on her
drawn-up knees, and stared across at the empty chair opposite her. She
wanted Tommy; Tommy who would so have talked if he had been there