ost of the women were of the kind vaguely
called emancipated, and professed some protest against male supremacy.
Yet these new women would always pay to a man the extravagant compliment
which no ordinary woman ever pays to him, that of listening while he
is talking. And Mr. Lucian Gregory, the red-haired poet, was really (in
some sense) a man worth listening to, even if one only laughed at the
end of it. He put the old cant of the lawlessness of art and the art
of lawlessness with a certain impudent freshness which gave at least a
momentary pleasure. He was helped in some degree by the arresting oddity
of his appearance, which he worked, as the phrase goes, for all it
was worth. His dark red hair parted in the middle was literally like a
woman's, and curved into the slow curls of a virgin in a pre-Raphaelite
picture. From within this almost saintly oval, however, his face
projected suddenly broad and brutal, the chin carried forward with a
look of cockney contempt. This combination at once tickled and terrified
the nerves of a neurotic population. He seemed like a walking blasphemy,
a blend of the angel and the ape.

This particular evening, if it is remembered for nothing else, will be
remembered in that place for its strange sunset. It looked like the
end of the world. All the heaven seemed covered with a quite vivid and
palpable plumage; you could only say that the sky was full of feathers,
and of feathers that almost brushed the face. Across the great part of
the dome they were grey, with the strangest tints of violet and mauve
and an unnatural pink or pale green; but towards the west the whole
grew past description, transparent and passionate, and the last red-hot
plumes of it covered up the sun like something too good to be seen. The
whole was so close about the earth, as to express nothing but a violent
secrecy. The very empyrean seemed to be a secret. It expressed that
splendid smallness which is the soul of local patriotism. The very sky
seemed small.

I say that there are some inhabitants who may remember the evening
if only by that oppressive sky. There are others who may remember it
because it marked the first appearance in the place of the second
poet of Saffron Park. For a long time the red-haired revolutionary had
reigned without a rival; it was upon the night of the sunset that his
solitude suddenly ended. The new poet, who introduced himself by the
name of Gabriel Syme was a very mild-looking mortal, w