hionable restaurant and a stockbroker's office. He had not felt so
uncomfortable since he had been a schoolboy in the presence of his head
master, and yet he enjoyed a European reputation, while outside the
Anglo-Saxon world Sir Henry was hardly known.

The great actor condescendingly escorted the great artist down the
heavily carpeted stairs to a private door which led to the dress
circle. The theatre was in darkness. The seats were covered up in
their white sheets, and Sir Henry looked round him and sighed,--

'Ah! cold, cold, a theatre soon grows cold. But it possesses you. Art
is very like a woman. She only yields up her treasure to the purest
passion.'

'Art has nothing to do with women,' Charles rapped out, and, as Sir
Henry had only been making a phrase, he was not offended. Charles
shook the large fat hand which was held out to him, and plunged into
the street.... Ah! It was good to be in the air again, to gaze up at
the sky, to see the passers-by moving about their business. There was
a stillness about the theatre which made him think of Sir Henry in his
room as rather like a large pale fish swimming about in a tank in a
dark aquarium.... After his years of freedom in delightful countries,
where people were in no hurry and were able most charmingly to do
nothing in particular for weeks on end, the captivity of so eminent and
powerful a person appalled and crushed him.... He had not encountered
anything like it in his previous sojourn in London, and he was again
possessed with the bewildered rage that had seized him when he saw the
rebuilt station on his arrival. He had been out of it all for so long,
yet he was of it, and he shuddered away from the increased captivity of
London, yet longed to have been part of it.... It was almost
bewilderingly a new city. During his absence, the immense change from
horse to petrol-driven vehicles had taken place and a new style of
architecture had been introduced. The air was cleaner: so were the
streets. Shop windows were larger. There was everywhere more display,
more colour, more and swifter movement, and yet in the theatre was that
deadly stillness.

He turned into a magnificent shop, where all the flowers looked rather
like little girls dressed up for a party, and ordered some roses to be
sent to Clara, for whom he had begun to feel a rudimentary
responsibility. It comforted him to do that. Somehow it broke the
stillness which had infected him, and