young comedian with nothing to offer waste time portentously, talk in a low voice with the orchestra leader; and the only thing he liked would be the strength and balance of the acrobats.
Finally, drowned in a sea-depth of grey horror, and with the weary brutal laughter of the audience ringing in his ears, he would rush out on the street again, filled with its hideous Sunday dullness and the sterile wink of the chop-suey signs, and take the train to Cambridge.
And there, as the night grew late, his spirit would surge up in him; sunken in books at midnight, with the soft numb prescience of brooding snow upon the air, the feeling of exultancy, joy, and invincible strength would come back; and he was sure that the door would open for him, the magic word be spoken, and that he would make all of the glory, power, and beauty of the earth his own.
XVIII
One day the boy telephoned the girl of whom his Uncle Bascom had spoken. She was coy and cautious, but sounded hopeful: he liked her voice. When, after some subtle circumlocutions, he asked her for an early meeting, she countered swiftly by asking him to meet her the following evening at the North Station: she was coming in to town to perform at a dinner. She played the violin. He understood very well that she was really anxious to see him before admitting him to the secure licence of a suburban parlour; so he bathed himself, threw powder under his arm-pits, and put on a new shirt, which he bought for the occasion.
It was November: rain fell coldly and drearily. He buttoned himself in his long raincoat and went to meet her. She had promised to wear a red carnation; the suggestion was her own, and tickled him hugely. As the pink-faced suburbanites poured, in an icy stream, into the hot waiting-room, he looked for her. Presently he saw her: she came toward him immediately, since his height was unmistakable. They talked excitedly flustered, but gradually getting some preliminary sense of each other.
She was a rather tall, slender girl, dressed in garments that seemed to have been left over, in good condition, from the early part of the century. She wore a flat but somehow towering hat: it seemed to perch upon her head as do those worn by the Queen of England. She was covered with a long blue coat, which flared and bustled at the hips, and had screws and curls of black corded ornament; she looked respectable and antiquated, but her costume, and a naïve stupidity in her manner, gave her a quaintness
