to control these people of the
underworld with laws and regulations and penalties which had been
devised to control individuals who represented moral declension from the
standards of a genteel civilization. Mrs. Murdoch, Poppy, Barnes,
Daisy--they all inverted the very fabric of society. They were moral
antipodeans to the magistrate or the legislator or the social reformer.
They were pursuing and acting up to their own ideals of conduct: they
were not fleeing or falling away from a political morality. Was it
possible, then, to say that evil was something more than a mere failure
to conform to goodness? Was it possible to declare confidently the
absolutism of evil? In this topsyturvydom might there not be perceived a
great constructive force?

Michael pondered these questions a good deal. He had not enough evidence
as yet to provide him with a synthesis; but as he sat through the rapid
darkening of the September dusks, it seemed to him that very often he
was trembling upon the verge of a discovery. Leppard Street came to
stand as a dark antechamber with massive curtains drawn against the
light, the light which in the past he had only perceived through the
chinks of impenetrable walls. Leppard Street was Dante's obscure wood
of the soul; it rustled with a thousand intimations of spiritual events.
Leppard Street was dark, but Michael did not fear the gloom, because he
knew that he was winning here with each new experience a small advance;
at Oxford he had merely contemplated the result of the former
pilgrimages of other people. With a quickening of his ambition he told
himself that the light would be visible when he married Lily, that
through her salvation he would save himself.

Michael did not re-enter his own world, whose confusion of minor problems
would have destroyed completely his hope to stand unperplexed before the
problems of the underworld, the solution of which might help to solve
the universe or at any rate his own share in the universe. He did not
tell his mother or Stella where he was living, and their letters came to
him at his club. They did not worry him, although Stella threatened a
terrible punishment if he did not appear in their midst in time to give
her away in November. This he promised to do in spite of everything. He
was faithful to his search for Lily, and he even went so far as to call
upon Drake to ask if he had ever seen her since that night at the
Orient. But he had not. Michael did not vex