to rub a lamp. At the far, far end of the long shed four men were
standing with their backs to her, round a car. The globed lamp was
tricky, and the chamois-leather would slip and let her bark her knuckle
on the bracket. But the glow, born in the brass, grew clearer and
clearer, till suddenly, stooping to it, she looked into a mirror and saw
all the garage behind her and the long rows of cars bent in a yellow
curve, and little men and oily women walking incredibly upon the rounded
ball of the world. They hung with their feet on curving walls running
and walking without difficulty, blinking, moving, talking in a yellow
lake of brass.

Julien, Dennis and two others, stopping at car after car, came nearer
and nearer. And Julien, holding the inspection, nodded gravely to their
comments, searching car after car with his eyes as he walked up the
garage, until they rested on the head and the hair of the girl he knew;
then he paused, three cars from her, and watched the head as it hung
motionless, level with the lamp she had just turned into a mirror.

And within the field of her vision he had just appeared. He paused,
fantastic, upon the ball of the world, balanced amazingly with his feet
on the slope of a golden corridor, and, hypnotised, she watched his
face, bent into the horn of a young moon--Julien, and yet unearthly and
impossible. There were his two hands, lit in a brassy fire, hanging down
his sides, and the cane which he held in his left went out beyond the
scope of the corridor. The three others hung around him like bent corn.
She watched these yellow shades, as tall as ladders, talk and act in the
little theatre of the lamp.... He was coming up to her, he became
enormous, his head flew out of the top of the world, his feet ran down
into the centre of the earth. He was effacing the garage, he had eaten
up the corridor and all the cars. He must be touching her, he must have