cabs--all these things were as delightful
and as stimulating to the soul as the clouds that trailed the heavens,
the fronds of the lilac, and Leonardo's Cartoon in the Diploma Gallery.
All were equal manifestations of that energy in flower known as 'Life.'
They knew that everything they saw and felt and smelled OUGHT equally to
make them long to catch creatures to their hearts and cry: Hosanna! And
Nedda and Alan, bred in Hampstead, even knew that to admit that these
things did not all move them in the same way would be regarded as a sign
of anaemia. Nevertheless--most queerly--these four young people
confessed to each other all sorts of sensations besides that 'Hosanna'
one. They even confessed to rage and pity and disgust one moment, and to
joy and dreams the next, and they differed greatly as to what excited
which. It was truly odd! The only thing on which they did seem to agree
was that they were having 'a thundering good time.' A sort of sense of
"Blow everything!" was in their wings, and this was due not to the fact
that they were thinking of and loving and admiring the little gray
streets and the gentleman in Piccadilly--as, no doubt, in accordance with
modern culture, they should have been--but to the fact that they were
loving and admiring themselves, and that entirely without the trouble of
thinking about it at all. The practice, too, of dividing into couples
was distinctly precious to them, for, though they never failed to start
out together, they never failed to come home two by two. In this way did
they put to confusion Whitman and Dostoievsky, and all the other thinkers
in Hampstead. In the daytime they all, save Alan, felt that London ought
to be blown up; but at night it undermined their philosophies so that
they sat silent on the tops of their respective 'buses, with arms twined
in each other's. For then a something seemed to have floated up from
that mass of houses and machines, of men and trees, and to be hovering
above them, violet-colored, caught between the stars and the lights, a
spirit of such overpowering beauty that it drenched even Alan in a kind
of awe. After all, the huge creature that sat with such a giant's weight
on the country's chest, the monster that had spoiled so many fields and
robbed so many lives of peace and health, could fly at night upon blue
and gold and purple wings, murmur a passionate lullaby, and fall into
deep sleep!

One such night they went to the gallery at t