, then," he said, "that you never go to sleep before two?"

Frances Freeland corked the little bottle, as if enclosing within it that
awkward question.

"They don't happen to act with me, darling; but that's nothing. It's the
very thing for any one who has to sit up so late," and her eyes searched
his face. Yes--they seemed to say--I know you pretend to have work; but
if you only had a dear little wife!

"I shall leave you this bottle when I go. Kiss me."

John bent down, and received one of those kisses of hers that had such
sudden vitality in the middle of them, as if her lips were trying to get
inside his cheek. From the door he looked back. She was smiling,
composed again to her stoic wakefulness.

"Shall I shut the door, Mother?"

"Please, darling."

With a little lump in his throat John closed the door.

CHAPTER XVII

The London which Derek had said should be blown up was at its maximum of
life those May days. Even on this outer rampart of Hampstead, people,
engines, horses, all had a touch of the spring fever; indeed, especially
on this rampart of Hampstead was there increase of the effort to believe
that nature was not dead and embalmed in books. The poets, painters,
talkers who lived up there were at each other all the time in their great
game of make-believe. How could it be otherwise, when there was
veritably blossom on the trees and the chimneys were ceasing to smoke?
How otherwise, when the sun actually shone on the ponds? But the four
young people (for Alan joined in--hypnotized by Sheila) did not stay in
Hampstead. Chiefly on top of tram and 'bus they roamed the wilderness.
Bethnal Green and Leytonstone, Kensington and Lambeth, St. James's and
Soho, Whitechapel, Shoreditch, West Ham, and Piccadilly, they traversed
the whole ant-heap at its most ebullient moment. They knew their Whitman
and their Dostoievsky sufficiently to be aware that they ought to love
and delight in everything--in the gentleman walking down Piccadilly with
a flower in his buttonhole, and in the lady sewing that buttonhole in
Bethnal Green; in the orator bawling himself hoarse close to the Marble
Arch, the coster loading his barrow in Covent Garden; and in Uncle John
Freeland rejecting petitions in Whitehall. All these things, of course,
together with the long lines of little gray houses in Camden Town, long
lines of carts with bobtail horses rattling over Blackfriars' Bridge,
long smells drifting behind taxi