ightsome dream of ladies and
_mousselines de laine_, when suddenly the dream turned to a
nightmare. It seemed to him that there descended upon him a heavy
rolling weight, as of a bale of woollens. He awoke and found that it
was Rickman.

The poet lay face downwards across the body of his friend, and was
crooning into his ear the great chorus from the third act of Helen in
Leuce. He said that nobody but Spinky understood it. And Spinky
couldn't understand it if he wasn't drunk.

Whereupon Spinks was most curiously uplifted and consoled.

CHAPTER XIII

He woke tired out, as well he might be, after spending half the night
in the pursuit of young Joy personified in Miss Poppy Grace, young
Joy, who, like that little dancer, is the swiftest of all swift
things.

Rickman carried into this adventure a sort of innocence that renewed
itself, as by a miracle, every evening. His youth remained virgin
because of its incorruptible hope. He almost disarmed criticism by the
gaiety, the naivete of the pursuit. She was always in front of him,
that young Joy; but if he did not overtake her by midnight, he was all
the more sure that he would find her in the morning, with the dew on
her feet and the dawn on her forehead. He was convinced that it was
that sweet mystic mouth of hers which would one day tell him the
secret of the world. And long before the morning she would pick up her
skirts and be off again, swifter than ever, carrying her secret with
her.

And so the chase went on.

At the present moment he found himself in the society of Shame, the
oldest and most haggard of all the daughters of the night. She was in
no hurry to leave him. It seemed to him that she sat beside him,
formless and immense, that she laid her hands about him, and that the
burning on his poor forehead was her brand there; that the scorching
in his poor throat was the clutch of her fingers, and the torment in
all his miserable body her fine manipulation of his nerves. She knew
the secret of the world; and had no sort of hesitation about telling
it; it sounded to him uncommonly like something that he had heard
before. He recognized her as the form and voice of his own desire, the
loathsome familiar body of unutterable thoughts, sordid, virulent,
accusing, with a tongue that lashed through the flesh to the obscure
spirit inside him. And because he was a poet, and knew himself a poet,
because he had sinned chiefly through his imagination, it was thr