ps sound. It
seemed that the notion was not wholly foundationless.

CHAPTER VI

Michael had been practising all the morning of a dark November day, had
eaten a couple of sandwiches standing in front of his fire, and observed
with some secret satisfaction that the fog which had lifted for an
hour had come down on the town again in earnest, and that it was only
reasonable to dismiss the possibility of going out, and spend the
afternoon as he had spent the morning. But he permitted himself a few
minutes' relaxation as he smoked his cigarette, and sat down by the
window, looking out, in Lucretian mood, on to the very dispiriting
conditions that prevailed in the street.

Though it was still only between one and two in the afternoon, the
densest gloom prevailed, so that it was impossible to see the outlines
even of the houses across the street, and the only evidence that he
was not in some desert spot lay in the fact of a few twinkling lights,
looking incredibly remote, from the windows opposite and the gas-lamps
below. Traffic seemed to be at a standstill; the accustomed roar from
Piccadilly was dumb, and he looked out on to a silent and vapour-swathed
world. This isolation from all his fellows and from the chances of being
disturbed, it may be added, gave him a sense of extreme satisfaction. He
wanted his piano, but no intrusive presence. He liked the sensation of
being shut up in his own industrious citadel, secure from interruption.

During the last two months and a half since his return from Munich he
had experienced greater happiness, had burned with a stronger zest for
life than during the whole of his previous existence. Not only had he
been working at that which he believed he was fitted for, and which gave
him the stimulus which, one way or another, is essential to all good
work, but he had been thrown among people who were similarly employed,
with whom he had this great common ground of kinship in ambition and
aim. No more were the days too long from being but half-filled with work
with which he had no sympathy, and diversions that gave him no pleasure;
none held sufficient hours for all that he wanted to put into it. And in
this busy atmosphere, where his own studies took so much of his time
and energy, and where everybody else was in some way similarly employed,
that dismal self-consciousness which so drearily looked on himself
shuffling along through fruitless, uncongenial days was cracking off him
as th