That never again our lips might meet,
And never so softly fall the sleet
In gay-lamped, lyric Highbury.
Love made your lily face to shine,
But oh, your cheek was salt to mine,
As we walked home from Highbury._

_O starry street of shop and show,
And was it thus long years ago?
Was the full tale but waste and woe,
And Love but doom in Highbury,
My dusty, dreaming Highbury?_

A HAPPY NIGHT

SURBITON AND BATTERSEA

When I received the invitation to the whist-drive at Surbiton my first
thought was, "Not likely!" I had visions of a boring evening: I knew
Surbiton. I knew its elegances and petty refinements. I knew its
pathetic apings of Curzon Street and Grosvenor Square. I knew its
extremely dull smartness of speech and behaviour. I foresaw that I
should enjoy myself as much as I did at the Y.M.C.A. concert where
everybody sang refined songs and stopped the star from going on because
he was about to sing the "Hymn to Venus," which was regarded as "a
little amorous." The self-conscious waywardness, the deliberate
Bohemianism of Surbiton, I said to myself, is not for me. I shall either
overplay it or underplay it. Certainly I shall give offence if I am my
normal self. For the Bohemianism of Surbiton, I continued, has very
strict rules which nobody in Bohemia ever heard of, and you cannot be a
Surbiton Bohemian until you have mastered those rules and learned how
gracefully to transgress them. If I throw bread pellets at the girls,
they will call me unmannerly. If I don't they will call me stiff. You
may have noticed that those pseudo-intellectuals who like to think
themselves Bohemian are always terrified when they are brought up
against anything that really is unconventional. On the other hand, your
true Bohemian is disgusted if anybody describes him by that word; if
there is one word that he detests more than Belgravia, it is Bohemia.
No, I shall certainly not go.

Surbiton ... Surbiton. I repeated the name aloud, tasting its flavour.
It has always had to me something brackish, something that fills my
mind with grey pain and makes me yearn for my old toys. It is curious
how the places and streets of London assume a character from one's own
moods. All the big roads have a very sharp character of their own. If
all other indications were lacking, one might know at once whether the
place were Edgware Road or Old Ford Road, simply by the sounds and by
the swe