etic pleasure, until one night it collapsed upon him
in the middle of the night. Every piece of upholstery in the room was
covered with art linens that with the marching years had ousted the art
muslins of Michael's childhood. He also covered with squares of the same
material the gas brackets, pushing them back against the wall and
relying for light upon candles only. Notwithstanding Wilmot's talk about
literature, the influence of Wilmot's friends was too strong, and
Michael could not resist the deckle-edges of negligible poets. As these
were expensive, Michael's library lacked scope, and he himself,
reflecting his pastime, came to believe in the bitterness and sweetness
and bitter-sweetness of the plaintive sinners who printed so elegantly
on such permanent paper the versification of their irregularity.

Irregularity was now being subjected to Michael's process of idealistic
alchemy, and since his conception of irregularity was essentially
romantic, and since he shrank from sentiment, he was able to save
himself, when presently all this decoration fell to pieces, and revealed
naked unpleasantness. Nothing in his present phase had yet moved him so
actually as his brief encounter with Brother Aloysius. That glimpse of a
fearful and vital underworld had been to him romantic without trappings;
it was a glimpse into an underworld to which one day he might descend,
since it asked no sighing for the vanished joys of the past, for the
rose-gardens of Rome. He began to play with the idea of departing
suddenly from his present life and entering the spectral reality of the
Seven Sisters Road, treading whatever raffish raddled pavement knew the
hollow steps of a city's prowlers. Going home on Sunday nights from the
perfumed house in Edwardes Square and passing quickly and apprehensively
figures that materialized in a circle of lamplight, he would contrast
their existence with what remained in his senses of stale
cigarette-smoke and self-conscious airs and attitudes. Yet the very
picture he conjured of the possibility that haunted him made him the
more anxious to substitute for the stark descent to hell the Sicilian or
Satanic affectations of the luxurious mimes who postured against a
background of art. Much of the talk at Edwardes Square concerned itself
with the pastoral side of school-life, and Michael found himself being
cross-questioned by elderly faun-like men who had a conception of an
English public-school that was more Ori