He decided that it would not
be wise at all. What then? Impossible to say. It worried him. He had a
natural horror of any sort of scandal, and he was very fond of Hilary.
If only he knew the attitude Bianca would take up! He could not even
guess it.
Thus, on that Saturday afternoon, the 4th of May, he felt for once such
a positive aversion from the reading of reviews, as men will feel from
their usual occupations when their nerves have been disturbed. He stayed
late at Chambers, and came straight home outside an omnibus.
The tide of life was flowing in the town. The streets were awash with
wave on wave of humanity, sucked into a thousand crossing currents.
Here men and women were streaming out from the meeting of a religious
congress, there streaming in at the gates of some social function; like
bright water confined within long shelves of rock and dyed with myriad
scales of shifting colour, they thronged Rotten Row, and along the
closed shop-fronts were woven into an inextricable network of little
human runlets. And everywhere amongst this sea of men and women could
be seen their shadows, meandering like streaks of grey slime stirred
up from the lower depths by some huge, never-ceasing finger. The
innumerable roar of that human sea climbed out above the roofs and
trees, and somewhere in illimitable space blended, and slowly reached
the meeting-point of sound and silence--that Heart where Life, leaving
its little forms and barriers, clasps Death, and from that clasp springs
forth new-formed, within new barriers.
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