rom Saxton Square to Portland Place, that the
streets and houses encountered by her had become individual, alive,
always offering to her some fresh adventure or romance. Portland Place
itself was no bad beginning, with its high white colour, its air, and
its dark mysterious park hovering at the edge of it.

If one had not known, Miss Rand thought, one might have supposed that
just beyond it lay the sea, so fresh and full of breezes was the air.
The light was yellow now and the houses black and sharp against the
faint sky. In another half-hour the lamps would be lit.

It was pleasant and fitting that the end of Portland Place should be
guarded by the Round Church and the Queen's Hall. "Leave that calm and
chaste society behind you," those places said, "but before you plunge
into the wicked careless world (that is Oxford Circus) choose from us.
Here you have religion or music, both if you will, but here at any rate
we are, the very best of our kind."

The Queen's Hall looked shabby in the evening light, but Miss Rand liked
that; it heightened her sense of the splendour within--Beethoven and
Wagner and Brahms needed no illumination--it was your musical comedy
demanded that.

Miss Rand liked good music.

Then there was the Polytechnic with wonderful offers in the windows
enticing you to see Rome for eleven guineas, and Paris for three, and
there was a hat shop with three glorious hats wickedly dangling on
poles, and there was a pastry-cook's, a tobacconist's, and a theatre
agency: all this variety paving the way between music and religion and
the whirling, tossing, heaving melodrama of Oxford Circus.

Miss Rand loved Oxford Circus. It was like the sea in that it was never
from one moment to another the same. Miss Rand knew the way that it had
of piling the melodrama up and up, faster and faster, wilder and wilder,
bursting into a frantio climax and then sinking back, for hours perhaps,
into comparative silence. She knew all its moods, from its broom and
milkman mood in the early morning, to its soiled and slinking mood
somewhere between midnight and one o'clock.

Just now it was getting ready for the evening. Up Regent Street the cabs
and buses were straining, the flower women with their baskets were
bunched in splashes of colour against the distant outline of the Round
Church. Out of every door people were pouring, and in the middle of the
Circus three of the four lines of traffic were turned suddenly into
somethin