to
like and understand him so much, Emile; you more, far more, than any one
else."

The cab was now in a steep and narrow street leading down from the Strand
to the Thames Embankment--a street that was obscure and that looked sad
and evil by night. Artois glanced out at it, and Hermione, seeing that he
did so, followed his eyes. They saw a man and a woman quarrelling under a
gas-lamp. The woman was cursing and crying. The man put out his hand and
pushed her roughly. She fell up against some railings, caught hold of
them, turned her head and shrieked at the man, opening her mouth wide.

"Poor things!" Hermione said. "Poor things! If we could only all be good
to each other! It seems as if it ought to be so simple."

"It's too difficult for us, nevertheless."

"Not for some of us, thank God. Many people have been good to me--you for
one, you most of all my friends. Ah, how blessed it is to be out here!"

She leaned over the wooden apron of the cab, stretching out her hands
instinctively as if to grasp the space, the airy darkness of the
spreading night.

"Space seems to liberate the soul," she said. "It's wrong to live in
cities, but we shall have to a good deal, I suppose. Maurice needn't
work, but I'm glad to say he does."

"What does he do?"

"I don't know exactly, but he's in his father's shipping business. I'm an
awful idiot at understanding anything of that sort, but I understand
Maurice, and that's the important matter."

[Illustration: "'SPACE SEEMS TO LIBERATE THE SOUL,' SHE SAID"]

They were now on the Thames Embankment, driving slowly along the broad
and almost deserted road. Far off lights, green, red, and yellow, shone
faintly upon the drifting and uneasy waters of the river on the one side;
on the other gleamed the lights from the houses and hotels, in which
people were supping after the theatres. Artois, who, like most fine
artists, was extremely susceptible to the influence of place and of the
hour, with its gift of light or darkness, began to lose in this larger
atmosphere of mystery and vaguely visible movement the hitherto
dominating sense of himself, to regain the more valuable and more
mystical sense of life and its strange and pathetic relation with nature
and the spirit behind nature, which often floated upon him like a tide
when he was creating, but which he was accustomed to hold sternly in
leash. Now he was not in the mood to rein it in. Maurice Delarey and his
business, Hermione, her