work-room.

A pair of lovers cross the park, holding each other's hands. They
will return later in the day, but there will be another expression in
their eyes, another meaning in the pressure of their hands. Now the
purity of the morning is with them.

Some fat, middle-aged clerk comes puffing into view: his ridiculous
little figure very podgy. He stops to take off his hat and mop his
bald head with his handkerchief: even to him the morning lends
romance. His fleshy face changes almost as one looks at him. One
sees again the lad with his vague hopes, his absurd ambitions.

There is a statue of Aphrodite in one of the smaller Paris parks.
Twice in the same week, without particularly meaning it, I found
myself early in the morning standing in front of this statue gazing
listlessly at it, as one does when in dreamy mood; and on both
occasions, turning to go, I encountered the same man, also gazing at
it with, apparently, listless eyes. He was an uninteresting looking
man--possibly he thought the same of me. From his dress he might
have been a well-to-do tradesman, a minor Government official,
doctor, or lawyer. Quite ten years later I paid my third visit to
the same statue at about the same hour. This time he was there
before me. I was hidden from him by some bushes. He glanced round
but did not see me; and then he did a curious thing. Placing his
hands on the top of the pedestal, which may have been some seven feet
in height, he drew himself up, and kissed very gently, almost
reverentially, the foot of the statue, begrimed though it was with
the city's dirt. Had he been some long-haired student of the Latin
Quarter one would not have been so astonished. But he was such a