s appearing at.
Quite a small part; but at least it's a lady-like one, and her stage
name is Miss Blanche Nevill. Good-night, you fellows!"

They echoed his farewell, and then, finding no belated growler, set out
to walk all the way back to Tavistock Square. They mentioned neither
Hilaria nor Blanche Grey again that night, but as Ishmael lay for a long
time awake staring into the darkness he could not keep his mind from
reverting with a sense of deep fear to what he had heard about Hilaria.
That such things could lie in wait in life, around the path of people
one knew--people like oneself.... To others these exotic misfortunes,
not to oneself or those near one. He had the sensation of incredulity
with which one hears of some intimate friend involved in a train
accident or attacked by some freakish fate such as may be read of in the
newspapers daily but is never realised as being an actual and possible
happening. Polkinghorne's death had made him believe there was such a
thing as death, but it was so remote. This was different. If these
things could come into life, ordinary every-day life....

He sorrowed not only for Hilaria, but for life. The news had given him
his first pang of dread about it; his trust in it was never to be quite
the same again. That was all, for him, that Hilaria had existed for,
simply to teach him so much of knowledge. It seemed odd, even to the
egoism of his youth, that she should have had so great a share in the
pattern of his life at one time only to go out of it so inevitably. He
was not to realise for many years how important the lesson was of which
she, by the mere news of her state, had taught him the beginnings. If
her contact with him formerly had been less, so would the shock of the
news have been. People have impinged more deeply upon others' lives and
both by their entry and their leaving of them stood for less.

CHAPTER X

BLIND STEPS

From that evening Ishmael entered upon a new phase of his London visit.
He told himself, when seriously considering the situation now and then,
that he was certainly not in love. He was deeply interested in Blanche
Grey, but if this were being in love, then was that emotion very
different from anything the books always led one to expect. For
instance, had the question been posed him by some wizard potent to
arrange the lives of humans, whether he would sooner let Cloom or Miss
Grey slip away from him, he would not have hesitated. His values