canvas town, scarlet and gold
and crystal, the merry-go-round glittered in the sun. The balloon-man
walked among the crowd, and above his head, like a huge, inverted
bunch of many-coloured grapes, the balloons strained upwards. With a
scythe-like motion the boat-swings reaped the air, and from the funnel
of the engine which worked the roundabout rose a thin, scarcely wavering
column of black smoke.

Denis had climbed to the top of one of Sir Ferdinando's towers, and
there, standing on the sun-baked leads, his elbows resting on the
parapet, he surveyed the scene. The steam-organ sent up prodigious
music. The clashing of automatic cymbals beat out with inexorable
precision the rhythm of piercingly sounded melodies. The harmonies were
like a musical shattering of glass and brass. Far down in the bass
the Last Trump was hugely blowing, and with such persistence, such
resonance, that its alternate tonic and dominant detached themselves
from the rest of the music and made a tune of their own, a loud,
monotonous see-saw.

Denis leaned over the gulf of swirling noise. If he threw himself over
the parapet, the noise would surely buoy him up, keep him suspended,
bobbing, as a fountain balances a ball on its breaking crest. Another
fancy came to him, this time in metrical form.

"My soul is a thin white sheet of parchment stretched Over a bubbling
cauldron."

Bad, bad. But he liked the idea of something thin and distended being
blown up from underneath.

"My soul is a thin tent of gut..."

or better--

"My soul is a pale, tenuous membrane..."

That was pleasing: a thin, tenuous membrane. It had the right anatomical
quality. Tight blown, quivering in the blast of noisy life. It was time
for him to descend from the serene empyrean of words into the actual
vortex. He went down slowly. "My soul is a thin, tenuous membrane..."

On the terrace stood a knot of distinguished visitors. There was old
Lord Moleyn, like a caricature of an English milord in a French comic
paper: a long man, with a long nose and long, drooping moustaches and
long teeth of old ivory, and lower down, absurdly, a short covert coat,
and below that long, long legs cased in pearl-grey trousers--legs that
bent unsteadily at the knee and gave a kind of sideways wobble as
he walked. Beside him, short and thick-set, stood Mr. Callamay, the
venerable conservative statesman, with a face like a Roman bust, and
short white hair. Young girls didn't much like going