consumed in barren adoration of a lost soul, a cold and unresponding heart. And it was all wrought mournfully there into the scheme of night, made legible in the quiet and gracious loveliness of these two women, so strong, so patient, and so infinitely loyal, pacing slowly down behind two drunken boys in the slant steep street and emptiness of night.
Suddenly the image blazed to the structure of hard actuality: another bar, and all around hoarse laughter, high sanguinary voices, a sudden scheme of faces scarred with night, and vivid with night’s radiance—prostitutes, taxi-drivers, negroes, and those other nameless unmistakable ones—who come from somewhere—God knows where—and who live somehow—God knows how—and who recede again at morning into unknown cells—but who live here only, brief as moths, and balefully as a serpent’s eye, in the unwholesome chemistry of night.
He found himself leaning heavily on the zinc counter of the bar, staring at a pair of whited, flabby-looking arms, the soiled apron and shirt, the soiled night-time face and dark, mistrustful eyes of night’s soiled barman. The blur of hoarse voices, shouts and oaths and laughter fused around him, and suddenly beside him he heard Starwick’s voice, drunken, quiet, and immensely still.
“Monsieur,” it said—its very stillness cut like a knife through all the fog of sound about him—“monsieur, du feu, s’il vous plaît.”
“But sairtainlee, monsieur,” a droll and pleasant-sounding voice said quietly. “W’y not?”
He turned and saw Starwick, a cigarette between his lips, bending awkwardly to get the light from a proffered cigarette which a young Frenchman was holding carefully for him. At last he got it; puffing awkwardly, and straightening, he slightly raised his hat in salutation, and said with drunken gravity:
“Merci. Vous êtes bien gentil.”
“But,” said the young Frenchman again, drolly, and with a slight shrug of his shoulder, “not at all! Eet ees noz-zing!”
And as Starwick started to look at him with grave drunken eyes, the Frenchman returned his look with a glance that was perfectly composed, friendly, good-humoured, and drolly inquiring.
“Monsieur?” he said courteously, as Starwick continued to look at him.
“I think,” said Starwick slowly, with the strangely mannered and almost womanish intonation in his voice, “I think I like you very much. You
