ain--dull, quick, slow,
ordinary, depressed, gay; political busy-bodies, political fools,
political slaves, political animals. How they huddled together, each one
of them afraid to stand for himself. It was political passion that made
them animals, each dependent in turn on the mimicry of his neighbor.
Each was solicitous or jealous or fond or envious of his neighbor's
opinion. God was meaningless to the political state: this herd cared
only for idols. Michael began to make a catalogue of the Golden Calves
that the Golden Asses of green England worshiped. They were bowing down
and braying to their Golden Calves, these Golden Asses, and they could
not see that there were rose-trees growing everywhere, most prodigally
of all in the gutter, any one petal of which (what did the thorns
matter?) would have given back to them their humanity. Yet even then,
Michael dismally concluded, they would continue to bow down to the
Golden Calves, because they would fancy that it was the Calves who had
planted and cultivated the rose-trees. Then out of all the thronging
thoughts made visible he began to pursue the fancy of Sylvia in London,
and, as he did so, she faded farther and farther from his vision like a
butterfly seen from a train, that keeps pace, it seems for a moment, and
is lost upon the flowery embankment behind.

Meanwhile, Michael was feeling sharpened for conflict by that talk under
the mulberry tree: he realized what an amount of determination he had
stored up for the persuasion of Sylvia. Now there only remained Leppard
Street, and then he would go away from London. He walked on through the
Chelsea slums.

Leppard Street was more melancholy in the sunshine than it had ever
seemed in Winter, not so much because the sun made more evident the
corrosion and the foulness as because of the stillness it shed. Not a
breath of air twitched the torn paper-bag on the doorstep of Number One;
and the five tall houses with their fifty windows stared at the blank
wall opposite.

Michael wondered if Barnes would be out of bed: it was not yet one
o'clock. He rang the front-door bell, or rather he hoped that the
creaking of the broken wire along the basement passage would attract
Mrs. Cleghorne's attention. When he had tugged many times, she came out
into the area, and peered up to see who it was. The sudden sunlight must
have dazzled her eyes, for she was shading them with her hand. With her
fibrous neck working and with an old cap o