steam escape,
and clucked his tongue, flourishing his whip, wheeling his horses,
and even they, poor things, had smelled the spring, and for a brief
half-hour spurned the pavement with happy hoofs.

The whole town was alive; the boughs, curled upward with their decking
of young leaves, awaited some gift the breeze could bring. New-lighted
lamps were gaining mastery, and the faces of the crowd showed pale under
that glare, while on high the great white clouds slid swiftly, softly,
over the purple sky.

Men in, evening dress had thrown back overcoats, stepping jauntily up
the steps of Clubs; working folk loitered; and women--those women who
at that time of night are solitary--solitary and moving eastward in a
stream--swung slowly along, with expectation in their gait, dreaming of
good wine and a good supper, or--for an unwonted minute, of kisses given
for love.

Those countless figures, going their ways under the lamps and the
moving-sky, had one and all received some restless blessing from the
stir of spring. And one and all, like those clubmen with their opened
coats, had shed something of caste, and creed, and custom, and by the
cock of their hats, the pace of their walk, their laughter, or their
silence, revealed their common kinship under the passionate heavens.

Bosinney and June entered the theatre in silence, and mounted to
their seats in the upper boxes. The piece had just begun, and the
half-darkened house, with its rows of creatures peering all one way,
resembled a great garden of flowers turning their faces to the sun.

June had never before been in the upper boxes. From the age of fifteen
she had habitually accompanied her grandfather to the stalls, and not
common stalls, but the best seats in the house, towards the centre of
the third row, booked by old Jolyon, at Grogan and Boyne's, on his way
home from the City, long before the day; carried in his overcoat pocket,
together with his cigar-case and his old kid gloves, and handed to June
to keep till the appointed night. And in those stalls--an erect old
figure with a serene white head, a little figure, strenuous and eager,
with a red-gold head--they would sit through every kind of play, and on
the way home old Jolyon would say of the principal actor: "Oh, he's a
poor stick! You should have seen little Bobson!"

She had looked forward to this evening with keen delight; it was stolen,
chaperone-less, undreamed of at Stanhope Gate, where she was supposed