V

them the right sort of people to have the trouble of living in Highgate. They probably walked about with knapsacks on Sunday. But to them even the real country could not be country. All “circles” must be like that in some way; doing things by agreement. The men talking confidently about them, completely ignorant of any sort of reality.⁠ ⁠… She came out of her musings when they turned into the Euston Road and ironically watched the men keeping up their talk across the continual breaking up of the group by passing pedestrians. You’ll have to walk back she interrupted, suddenly turning to Mr. Bowdoin; the buses will have stopped. I never ride in omnibuses frowned Mr. Bowdoin. I shall be back by two.⁠ ⁠… Miriam waited a moment inside the door at Tansley Street listening for silence. The evening fell away from her with the departing footsteps of the two men. She opened the door upon the high quiet empty blue-lit street and moved out into a tranquil immensity. It was everywhere. Into her consciousness of the unpredictable incidents of tomorrow’s Wimpole Street day, over the sure excitement of Eve’s arrival in the evening flowed the light-footed leaping sense of a day new begun, an inexhaustible blissfulness, everything melted away into it. It seemed to smite her, calling for some spoken acknowledgment of its presence, alive and real in the heart of the London darkness. It was not her fault that Eve was not coming to stay at Tansley Street. It came out of the way life arranged itself as long as you did not try to interfere. Roaming along in the twilight she lost consciousness of everything but the passage of dark silent buildings, the drawing away under her feet of the varying flags of the pavement, the waxing and waning along the pavement of the streams of lamplight, the distant murmuring tide of sound passing through her from wide thoroughfares, the gradual approach of a thoroughfare, the rising of the murmuring tide to a happy symphony of recognisable noises, the sudden glare of yellow shop-light under her feet, the wide black road, the joy of the need for the understanding sweeping glance from right to left as she moved across it, the sense of being swept across in an easy curve drawn by the kindly calculable swing of the traffic, of