r in the air?

Next morning came a telegram from Stella in Paris:

_join me here rather quickly._

Michael left Cornwall that afternoon, and all the length of the
harassing journey to London he thought of his friends bathing all day
and talking half through the intimate night, until gradually, as the
train grew hotter, they stood out in his memory like cool people
eternally splashed by grateful fountains. Yet at the back of all his
regrets for Cornwall, Michael was thinking of Stella and wondering
whether the telegram was merely due to her impetuous way or whether
indeed she wanted him more than rather quickly.

It was dark when he reached London, and in the close August night the
street-lamps seemed to have lost all their sparkle, seemed to glow
luridly like the sinister lamps of a dream.

"I'm really awfully worried," he said aloud to himself, as through the
stale city air the hansom jogged heavily along from Paddington to
Charing Cross.

Michael arrived at Paris in the pale burning blue of an August morning,
and arriving as he did in company with numerous cockney holiday-makers,
something of the spirit of Paris was absent. The city did not express
herself immediately as Paris unmistakable, but more impersonally as the
great railway-station of Europe, a center of convenience rather than the
pulsing heart of pleasure. However, as soon as Michael had taken his
seat in the bony fiacre and had ricocheted from corner to corner of half
a dozen streets, Paris was herself again, with her green jalousies and
gilded letterings, her prodigality of almost unvarying feminine types,
those who so neatly and so gayly hurried along the pavements and those
who in soiled dressing-jackets hung listlessly from upper windows.

Stella's address was near the Quai d'Orsay; and when Michael arrived he
found she was living in rooms over a bookseller's shop with a view of
the Seine and beyond of multitudinous roofs that in the foreground
glistened to the sun like a pattern of enamel, until with distance they
gradually lost all definition and became scarcely more than a woven
damascene upon the irresolute horizon of city and sky.

Michael never surrendered to disillusion the first impression of his
entrance that August morning. In one moment of that large untidy room
looking over the city that most consciously of all cities has taken
account of artists he seemed to capture the symbol of the artist's
justification. Stella's chestnut h