lives; the shopgirls, also in hope of something to "take them out of
themselves"--pathetic desire of escape from the little prison, where the
soul sits, picking its oakum sometimes, in its cell of flesh!--young
men making for the parks, workmen for the public houses, an old woman,
in a cap, peering out of an upper window in Prince's Gate; Italians with
an organ, and a monkey that looked as if it were dying of nostalgia;
women hurrying--whither?--with anxious faces, and bodies whose very
shapes, and whose every movement, suggested, rather proclaimed, worry.

Malling knew it was the rain, the possessive grayness, which troubled his
body to-night, and through his body troubled his spirit. His nostrils
inhaled the damp, and it seemed to go straight into his essence, into the
mystery that was he. His eyes saw no more blue, and it was as if they
drew a black shutter over all the blue in his heart, blotting it out.
People became doomed phantoms, because the weather had changed and
because London knows how to play Cassandra to the spirit of many a man.
To Malling, as he presently turned to the right, Hornton Street looked
like an alley leading straight to the pit of despair, and when he tapped
on the blistered green door of the small house where the curate lived, it
was as if he tapped seeking admittance to all the sorrowful things that
had been brought into being to beset his life with blackness.

A neat servant-girl opened the door. There was a smell of roast mutton in
the passage. So far well. Malling took off his hat and coat, hung them up
on a hook indicated by the plump red hand of the maid, and then followed
her upstairs. The curate was in possession of the first floor.

Malling knew that it would be a case of folding-doors and perhaps of
curtains of imitation lace. It was a case of folding-doors. But there
was a dull green hue on the walls that surely bespoke Henry Chichester's