erhaps, was not quite
so much of an impulse as it seemed. It passed through his mind that if
he missed this chance of talking to Katharine, he would have to face
an enraged ghost, when he was alone in his room again, demanding an
explanation of his cowardly indecision. It was better, on the whole, to
risk present discomfiture than to waste an evening bandying excuses
and constructing impossible scenes with this uncompromising section of
himself. For ever since he had visited the Hilberys he had been much at
the mercy of a phantom Katharine, who came to him when he sat alone, and
answered him as he would have her answer, and was always beside him to
crown those varying triumphs which were transacted almost every night,
in imaginary scenes, as he walked through the lamplit streets home from
the office. To walk with Katharine in the flesh would either feed that
phantom with fresh food, which, as all who nourish dreams are aware, is
a process that becomes necessary from time to time, or refine it to such
a degree of thinness that it was scarcely serviceable any longer; and
that, too, is sometimes a welcome change to a dreamer. And all the time
Ralph was well aware that the bulk of Katharine was not represented in
his dreams at all, so that when he met her he was bewildered by the fact
that she had nothing to do with his dream of her.

When, on reaching the street, Katharine found that Mr. Denham proceeded
to keep pace by her side, she was surprised and, perhaps, a little
annoyed. She, too, had her margin of imagination, and to-night her
activity in this obscure region of the mind required solitude. If she
had had her way, she would have walked very fast down the Tottenham
Court Road, and then sprung into a cab and raced swiftly home. The view
she had had of the inside of an office was of the nature of a dream to
her. Shut off up there, she compared Mrs. Seal, and Mary Datchet, and
Mr. Clacton to enchanted people in a bewitched tower, with the spiders'
webs looping across the corners of the room, and all the tools of the
necromancer's craft at hand; for so aloof and unreal and apart from
the normal world did they seem to her, in the house of innumerable
typewriters, murmuring their incantations and concocting their drugs,
and flinging their frail spiders' webs over the torrent of life which
rushed down the streets outside.

She may have been conscious that there was some exaggeration in this
fancy of hers, for she certainly