heir offspring, and to threaten them with father. Then
the torpor of beef and beer and cabbage settled down on the street; in
some houses they snorted and read the Parish Magazine, in some they
snored and read the murders and collected filth of the week; but the only
movement of the afternoon was a second procession of children, now
bloated and distended with food, again answering the summons of
tang, tang, tang. On the main road the trams, laden with impossible
people, went humming to and fro, and young men who wore bright blue ties
cheerfully haw-hawed and smoked penny cigars. They annoyed the shiny and
respectable and verjuice-lipped, not by the frightful stench of the
cigars, but because they were cheerful on Sunday. By and by the children,
having heard about Moses in the Bulrushes and Daniel in the Lion's Den,
came straggling home in an evil humor. And all the day it was as if on a
grey sheet grey shadows flickered, passing by.

And in the rose-garden every flower was a flame! He thought in symbols,
using the Persian imagery of a dusky court, surrounded by white
cloisters, gilded by gates of bronze. The stars came out, the sky glowed
a darker violet, but the cloistered wall, the fantastic trellises in
stone, shone whiter. It was like a hedge of may-blossom, like a lily
within a cup of lapis-lazuli, like sea-foam tossed on the heaving sea at
dawn. Always those white cloisters trembled with the lute music, always
the garden sang with the clear fountain, rising and falling in the
mysterious dusk. And there was a singing voice stealing through the white
lattices and the bronze gates, a soft voice chanting of the Lover and
the Beloved, of the Vineyard, of the Gate and the Way. Oh! the language
was unknown; but the music of the refrain returned again and again,
swelling and trembling through the white nets of the latticed cloisters.
And every rose in the dusky air was a flame.

He had seen the life which he expressed by these symbols offered to him,
and he had refused it; and he was alone in the grey street, with its
lamps just twinkling through the dreary twilight, the blast of a ribald
chorus sounding from the main road, a doggerel hymn whining from some
parlor, to the accompaniment of the harmonium. He wondered why he had
turned away from that woman who knew all secrets, in whose eyes were all
the mysteries. He opened the desk of his bureau, and was confronted by
the heap and litter of papers, lying in confusion as he