e comets' hair. There followed a moment when wisdom seemed to
crackle like a lit fire in his head. The plan of the universe lay set
out among the coins on the table, and he looked down on it and said, "Of
course!" But immediately he had forgotten why he had said it. The world
was the same again. And Ellen was sitting there on the other side of the
table, and she seemed very real.

She murmured petulantly, "I can't remember a thing mother said.... I
can't remember what I've got to buy," and swept the money into her
pocket. She was fatigued and blinded, as though all day she had watched
a procession of burnished armies passing in strong sunlight. "Let's go
on," she said, and while he found his hat and coat in the lobby she went
and stood in the garden, ringing her heels on the cold stone of the
path, drinking in the iced air, abandoning herself to the chill of the
evening as if it were a refuge from him.

But they were happy almost at once. Like all clever adolescents, she had
a mind like a rag-bag full of scraps of silks and satins and calicoes
and old bits of ribbon which was constantly bursting and scattering a
trail of allusions that were irrelevant to the occasion of their
appearance, and so when he came to her side she began talking about
George Borrow. Didn't he love "Lavengro," him being a traveller? And had
he ever seen a prize-fight? Oh, Yaverland had. He had even had the
privilege of crossing the Atlantic in the cattleboat _ss. Glory_ with
Jim Corraway, since known to fame as Cardiff Jim. But he broke it to her
that now many of the best boxers were Jew lads from the East End of
London, and not a few came from the special schools for the
feeble-minded; feeble-mindedness often gave a man the uncloudable temper
that makes a good boxer.

So, chattering like that, they came to the business of shopping. It was,
he thought, an extravagantly charming business. As well as any other
place on earth did he like this homely street, with its little low shops
that sent into the frosty air savoury smells of what they sold, and took
the chill off the moonlight with their yellow gas-jets. He liked its
narrow pavements thronged with shaggy terrier-like people who walked
briskly on short legs; he liked its cobbled roadway, along which passed
at intervals tramcars that lumbered along more slowly than any other
trams in the world, with an air of dignity which intimated that their
slowness was due to no mechanical defect, but to a