once, so much since he left Leppard Street had the imagination of her
raced backward and forward in his brain. Everything that would have made
their meeting painful in such surroundings was forgotten in the joyful
prospect at hand. The amount they would have to talk about was really
tremendous. Love had destroyed time so completely that Lily was to be
exactly the same as when first he had met her in Kensington Gardens.
However, her appearance on the pavement outside the theater had made
such a vivid new impression that Michael did pay as much attention to
lapsing time as to visualize her now in that black dress. Otherwise he
was himself again of six years ago, with only the delightful difference
that he was now independent and could carry her forthwith into marriage.
The knowledge that from a material point of view he could do this filled
him with a magnificent consciousness of life's plenitude. So far, all
his experiments in living had been bounded by ignorance or credulity on
his own side, and on the side of other people by their unsuitableness
for experiments. Certainly he had made discoveries, but they might
better be called disillusionments. Now here was Lily who would give him
herself to discover, who would open for him, not a looking-glass world
in which human nature reflected itself in endless reduplications of
perversity, but a world such as lovers only know, wherein the greatest
deeps are themselves. Michael scarcely bothered to worry himself with
the thought that Lily had embarked upon her own discoveries apart from
him; she had been bewitched again by his romantic spells into the
innocent girl of seventeen. All his hopes, all his quixotry, all his
capacity for idealization, all his prejudice and impulsiveness converged
upon her. Whatever had lately happened to spoil his theory of behavior
was discounted; and even the very theory fell to pieces in this
intoxication of happiness.

With so much therefore to make him buoyant, it was depressing to visit
the Orient that evening without a glimpse of Lily. The disappointment
threw Michael very unpleasantly back into those evenings when he had
come here regularly and had always been haunted by the dread that, when
he did see her, his resolve would collapse in the presence of a new Lily
wrought upon by man and not made more lovable thereby. The vision of her
last night (it was only last night) had swept him aloft; the queer
adventure with the woman in the basement ha