IV

be music at once, no meal to get through. She would thank him very much for the great treat and when it was over there would only be Eve and the accomplishment of having heard a good piano played by a musician. He could be dropped.⁠ ⁠… He could be asked to come just once and play for Eve. That would be a great London evening for Eve.⁠ ⁠… The sense of a complex London life crowded with engagements made her pace in spite of her weariness up and down the platform at Gower Street. Its familiar sulphurous gloom, the platform lights shining murkily from the midst of slowly rolling clouds of grey smoke, the dark forms and phantom white faces of waiting passengers emerging suddenly as she threaded the darkness, revived her. By the time the train rolled slowly in behind its beloved black dumpy high-shouldered engine with its large unshrieking mushroom bell-whistle the journey had changed from being an expedition to a spot within five minutes’ walk of Sarah’s, unconfessed to Sarah, and had become a journey on the Metropolitan; going indeed outside the radius into blackness, but going so far only because the Dante lecture, wandered out of London was waiting there; and to be repeated at the end of the evening safely returning through increasing gloom until the climax of Gower Street was reached again.⁠ ⁠… Miss Scott was Scotch .