the
doors were little notices scrawled in queer handwritings and telling
that a lodging was to let. Occasionally he paused, looked up and
hesitated, and then he went on. The difficulty was suddenly before him,
and he knew that even if he looked at the rooms he could not hire them,
as he had not enough money to cover the first month's rent. Immediately
he attempted to devise some means of raising the sum he needed, but
before he had reached the very next corner the clear north wind had
blown the trouble away like a cobweb. With all his strength and industry
and determination, he was still a very young man, and perplexity had no
hold upon him since passion had taken its own way.

He reached the corner of his own street and stood still for a few
moments. He could almost have smiled at himself as he paused. He had
been out more than an hour and had done nothing, thought out nothing,
made no definite plan for the future. His present poverty, which was
desperate enough, had put on a carnival mask and laughed at him, as it
were, and ran away when he tried to grapple with it and look it in the
face. Gloria was there, upstairs in that tall house on which the morning
sun was shining, and nothing else could possibly matter. But if anything
mattered, it would be simple to talk it over together and to decide it
in common.

Suddenly he felt ashamed of himself and of the confusion of his own
intelligence. There was something meek and childish in standing still at
the street corner, watching the people as they went by, listening to the
regularly recurring yell of the man who was selling country vegetables
from a hand-cart, and looking into the faces of people who went by, as
though expecting to find there some solution of a difficulty which his
disturbed powers of concentration did not clearly grasp. He could not
think connectedly, much less could he reason sensibly. He made a few
steps forward towards his house, and then stopped again, asking himself
what he was going to do. He felt that he had no right to go back to
Gloria until he had decided something for the future. He felt like a boy
who has been sent on an errand, and who comes back having forgotten what
he was to do. All at once he had lost his hold upon the logic of
common-sense, and when he groped for a thread that might lead him, he
was suddenly dazzled by the blaze of his happiness and deafened by the
voice of his own joy.

He went on again and came to his own door. The