did not wish to share it with Ralph.
To him, she supposed, Mary Datchet, composing leaflets for Cabinet
Ministers among her typewriters, represented all that was interesting
and genuine; and, accordingly, she shut them both out from all share
in the crowded street, with its pendant necklace of lamps, its lighted
windows, and its throng of men and women, which exhilarated her to such
an extent that she very nearly forgot her companion. She walked very
fast, and the effect of people passing in the opposite direction was
to produce a queer dizziness both in her head and in Ralph's, which set
their bodies far apart. But she did her duty by her companion almost
unconsciously.

"Mary Datchet does that sort of work very well.... She's responsible for
it, I suppose?"

"Yes. The others don't help at all.... Has she made a convert of you?"

"Oh no. That is, I'm a convert already."

"But she hasn't persuaded you to work for them?"

"Oh dear no--that wouldn't do at all."

So they walked on down the Tottenham Court Road, parting and coming
together again, and Ralph felt much as though he were addressing the
summit of a poplar in a high gale of wind.

"Suppose we get on to that omnibus?" he suggested.

Katharine acquiesced, and they climbed up, and found themselves alone on
top of it.

"But which way are you going?" Katharine asked, waking a little from the
trance into which movement among moving things had thrown her.

"I'm going to the Temple," Ralph replied, inventing a destination on the
spur of the moment. He felt the change come over her as they sat down
and the omnibus began to move forward. He imagined her contemplating the
avenue in front of them with those honest sad eyes which seemed to set
him at such a distance from them. But the breeze was blowing in their
faces; it lifted her hat for a second, and she drew out a pin and stuck
it in again,--a little action which seemed, for some reason, to make her
rather more fallible. Ah, if only her hat would blow off, and leave her
altogether disheveled, accepting it from his hands!

"This is like Venice," she observed, raising her hand. "The motor-cars,
I mean, shooting about so quickly, with their lights."

"I've never seen Venice," he replied. "I keep that and some other things
for my old age."

"What are the other things?" she asked.

"There's Venice and India and, I think, Dante, too."

She laughed.

"Think of providing for one's old age! And would you refu