tempts at sleep to the
open window where, as he sat thinking, a strange visionary survey of the
evening, a survey that he himself could scarcely account for, was
conjured up. He had not been aware at the time of much more than Drake
and the Turkish Delight stall. Now he realized that he too craved for a
Mabel, not a peony of a woman who could be flaunted like a vulgar
button-hole, but a more shy, a more subtle creature, yet conquerable.
Then, as Michael stared out over the housetops at the brooding pavilion
of sky which enclosed the hectic city, he began to recall the numberless
glances, the countless attitudes, all the sensuous phantasmagoria of the
Exhibition's population. He remembered a slim hand, a slanting eye, lips
translucent in a burst of light. He caught at scents that, always
fugitive, were now utterly incommunicable; he trembled at the
remembrance of some contact in a crowd that had been at once divinely
intimate and unendurably remote. The illusion of all the city's sleepers
calling to him became more and more vivid under each stifling breath of
the night. Somewhere beneath that sable diadem of chimney-tops she lay,
that lovely girl of his desire. He would not picture her too clearly
lest he should destroy the charm of this amazing omnipotence of longing.
He would be content to enfold the imagination of her, and at dawn let
her slip from his arms like a cloud. He would sit all the night time at
his window, aware of kisses. Was this the emotion that prompted poets to
their verses? Michael broke his trance to search for paper and pencil,
and wrote ecstatically.

In the morning, when he read what he had written, he hastily tore it up,
and made up his mind that the Earl's Court Exhibition would feed his
fire more satisfactorily than bad verses. Half a guinea would buy a
season-ticket, and July should be a pageant of sensations.

Every night Michael went to Earl's Court, and here a hundred brilliant
but evanescent flames were kindled in his heart, just as in the
Exhibition gardens every night for three hours the fairy-lamps spangled
the edge of the paths in threads of many-tinted lights. Michael always
went alone, because he did not desire any but his own discoveries to
reward his excited speculation. At first he merely enjoyed the sensation
of the slow stream of people that continually went up and down, or
strolled backwards and forwards, or circled round the bandstand that was
set out like a great gaudy coron