wealthy and she was to go up and keep house for him.

"There'll be gold chairs in the parlour and real Brussels," she
anticipated. Peter affected to think it unlikely that she could be
spared by the highly mythical person who was to carry her off to keep
house for himself. Somehow Peter could never fall into the normal
Bloombury attitude of thinking that if you had hip disease, your life
was bound to be different from everybody's and you might as well say so
right out, flat-footed, and be done with it.

With all this, finally he was got off to the city in the wake of Mr.
Greenslet, and the first discovery he made there was that outside of
Siegel Brothers, and a collarless man with a discouraged moustache who
appeared in the hall of his lodging-house when the rent was due, he was
practically invisible. As he went up and down the stairs sodden with
scrub water which never by any possible chance left them scrubbed,
nobody spoke to him. Nobody in the street saw him walking to and fro in
his young loneliness. There were men passing there with faces like Mr.
Dassonville's, keen and competent, and lovely ladies in soft becoming
wraps and bright winged hats--such hats! Peter would like to have hailed
some of these as one immeasurably behind but still in the way, seized of
that precious inward quality which manifests itself in competency and
brightness. He would have liked to feel them looking on friendlily at
his business of becoming rich; but he remained, as far as any word from
them was concerned, completely invisible. He came after a while to the
conclusion that most of those who went up and down with him were in the
same unregarded condition.

The city appeared quite habituated to this state of affairs; hordes of
them came and went unconfronted between banked windows of warmth and
loveliness, past doors from which light and music overflowed into the
dim street in splashes of colour and sound, where people equally under
the prohibition lapped them up hungrily like dogs at puddles. Sometimes
in the street cars or subways he brushed against fair girls from whom
the delicate aroma of personality was like a waft out of that country
of which his preferences and appreciations acknowledged him a native,
but no smallest flutter of kinship ever put forth from them to Peter.
The place was crammed full of everything that anybody could want and
nobody could get at it, at least not Peter, nor anybody he knew at
Siegel Brothers. And at