ittle movement--a
raised eyebrow seems almost enough--and the crinoline sways this way and
that, divinely true at the waist alone.... But it's not just their
grace; it's what they suggest. That feeling of a cage, of something
protective, which is what I mean by Oriental. So defined down to the
waist, and then this thing that makes a parade of not following
nature.... D'you know, I never watch a pretty woman in a crinoline but
the thought doesn't strike me?"

"It's the sort of thought that would, my son," opined Carminow.

"But you can't deny I'm right. No clinging drapery has ever been so
suggestive, so much the refinement of sensuality, as the crinoline."

Ishmael said nothing; but inwardly he too felt what Killigrew meant,
which he would not have done a week earlier. As he sat there, warm and
pleasantly stung by the wine he had drunk, the brightness of the scene
and the colour of the music and the thoughts they conjured up, as well
as the gowns and head-dresses of the pretty women, all awaked in him the
glow a child feels at its first pantomime. The dancers were to him not
flesh-and-blood women, but magical creatures, and yet he was stirred to
a new excitement too. As he sat there all the sense of poise with which
he usually so confidently faced the affairs of life, and which, far from
failing him, generally served him only too well, began to sway and grow
many-coloured.

When they went out into the street again he agreed with Carminow that
the night was yet too young to abandon it in mid-air. He did not,
however, feel like more drinks; the exhilaration of the play, of his own
youth, now for the first time tingling unrestrainedly in his veins, the
glamour of the gaily-lit night--they had wandered as far as the
Haymarket, which was ablaze till dawn--were all enough for him, and he
felt that anything more would have blurred their keenness. Suddenly
Carminow had an inspiration.

"Come back with me, you two," he suggested. "I've got quite decent digs
in Cecil Stweet, off the Stwand. And I've a little collection that
might intewest you...."

"I know, monstrosities in bottles and side elevations of premature
babies," surmised Killigrew; "you're a foul old thing! But we'll come
and have a yarn over 'em anyway. I'm not in a hurry to face my revered
parents and I daren't take this good little boy to some places you and I
know of. I'm responsible for him."

Carminow turned a pessimistic eye on Ishmael. "Are you still pu