as he went down the path.
The night was netted with the weaving sparkle of fireflies. He stood
for a moment, looking. Suddenly there came a frightened cry from the
nursery.

"Daddy, a keeto, a keeto!"

He nearly turned to run back, but checked himself. No, Mrs. Spaniel was
now in charge. It was up to her. Besides, he had only just enough time
to catch the last train to the city.

But he sat on the cinder-speckled plush of the smoker in a mood that was
hardly revelry. "By Jove," he said to himself, "I got away just in time.
Another month and I couldn't have done it."

It was midnight when he saw the lights of town, panelled in gold against
a peacock sky. Acres and acres of blue darkness lay close-pressing
upon the gaudy grids of light. Here one might really look at this great
miracle of shadow and see its texture. The dulcet air drifted lazily in
deep, silent crosstown streets. "Ah," he said, "here is where the blue
begins."

CHAPTER SIX

"For students of the troubled heart
Cities are perfect works of art."

There is a city so tall that even the sky above her seems to have lifted
in a cautious remove, inconceivably far. There is a city so proud, so
mad, so beautiful and young, that even heaven has retreated, lest her
placid purity be too nearly tempted by that brave tragic spell. In the
city which is maddest of all, Gissing had come to search for sanity. In
the city so strangely beautiful that she has made even poets silent, he
had come to find a voice. In the city of glorious ostent and vanity, he
had come to look for humility and peace.

All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are
beautiful: but the beauty is grim. Who shall tell me the truth about
this one? Tragic? Even so, because wherever ambitions, vanities, and
follies are multiplied by millionfold contact, calamity is there. Noble
and beautiful? Aye, for even folly may have the majesty of magnitude.
Hasty, cruel, shallow? Agreed, but where in this terrene orb will you
find it otherwise? I know all that can be said against her; and yet in
her great library of streets, vast and various as Shakespeare, is beauty
enough for a lifetime. O poets, why have you been so faint? Because she
seems cynical and crass, she cries with trumpet-call to the mind of the
dreamer; because she is riant and mad, she speaks to the grave sanity of
the poet.

So, in a mood perhaps too consciously lofty, Gissing was meditating.
It was rather im