the mystery and--passed by. The perfection of social intercourse he
conceived as a similar succession of radiant intimacies.

To-night he went southwards down Gower Street, drawn by the
never-ending fugitive perspective of the lamps. He went westwards down
Shaftesbury Avenue to Piccadilly. The Circus was a gleaming basin
filled with grey night clear as water, the floor of it alive with
lights. Lights that stood still; lights that wandered from darkness
into darkness; that met and parted, darting, wheeling, and crossing in
their flight. Long avenues opened out of it, precipitous deep cuttings
leading into the night. The steep, shadowy masses of building seemed
piled sky-high, like a city of the air; here the gleam of some golden
white facade, there some aerial battlement crowned with stars, with
clusters, and points, and rings of flame that made a lucid twilight of
the dark above them. Over all was an illusion of immensity.

Nine o'clock of an April night--the time when a great city has most
power over those that love her; the time when she lowers her voice and
subdues her brilliance, intimating that she is not what she seems;
when she makes herself unearthly and insubstantial, veiling her
grossness in the half-transparent night. Like some consummate
temptress, she plays the mystic, clothing herself with light and
darkness, skirting the intangible, hinting at the infinities, flinging
out the eternal spiritual lure, so that she may better seduce the
senses through the soul. And Rickman was too young a poet to
distinguish clearly between his senses and his imagination, or his
imagination and his soul.

He stood in Piccadilly Circus and regarded the spectacle of the night.
He watched the groups gathering at the street corners, the boys that
went laughing arm in arm, the young girls smiling into their lovers'
eyes; here and there the faces of other women, dubious divinities of
the gas-light and the pavement, passing and passing. A very ordinary
spectacle. But to Rickman it had an immense significance, a rhythmic,
processional resonance and grandeur. It was an unrhymed song out of
_Saturnalia_, it was the luminous, passionate nocturne of the streets.

Half-past nine; a young girl met him and stopped. She laughed into his
face.

"Pretty well pleased with yourself, aren't you?" said the young girl.

He laughed back again. He was pleased with the world, so of course he
was pleased with himself. They were one. The same spir