In the streets the soul is surprised through the lifting of an
eyelid, and the secret of the heart sits lightly on the curl of the
lip. These passers by never wearied him; they flung him the flower of
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.
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