no notion where or at what level he was. He was still full of the
cold splendour of space, and of what a French writer has
brilliantly named the "vertigo of the infinite," when another
door opened, and with a shock indescribable he found himself on
the familiar level, in a street full of faces, with the houses
and even the lamp-posts above his head. He felt suddenly happy
and suddenly indescribably small. He fancied he had been changed
into a child again; his eyes sought the pavement seriously as
children's do, as if it were a thing with which something
satisfactory could be done. He felt the full warmth of that
pleasure from which the proud shut themselves out; the pleasure
which not only goes with humiliation, but which almost is
humiliation. Men who have escaped death by a hair have it, and
men whose love is returned by a woman unexpectedly, and men whose
sins are forgiven them. Everything his eye fell on it feasted on,
not aesthetically, but with a plain, jolly appetite as of a boy
eating buns. He relished the squareness of the houses; he liked
their clean angles as if he had just cut them with a knife. The
lit squares of the shop windows excited him as the young are
excited by the lit stage of some promising pantomime. He
happened to see in one shop which projected with a bulging
bravery on to the pavement some square tins of potted meat, and
it seemed like a hint of a hundred hilarious high teas in a
hundred streets of the world. He was, perhaps, the happiest of
all the children of men. For in that unendurable instant when he
hung, half slipping, to the ball of St. Paul's, the whole
universe had been destroyed and re-created.

Suddenly through all the din of the dark streets came a crash of
glass. With that mysterious suddenness of the Cockney mob, a rush