It was eight o’clock when she left “Claremont.” In the Ridgeway the long green avenue seemed scarcely darker than before, though twilight was falling and the rising moon flooded the roadway in pale radiance. Everything reminded her of those old evening walks from the Bockley High School back home to No. 24, Kitchener Road. Groups of girls swept past her like fleecy clouds, with here and there the swift sparkle of an eye or the sudden flash of an ornament caught in the jets of moonlight that fell through the lacery of leaves. She was very happy. All the poetry in the world was greeting her. And the Ridgeway, so sleek, so dapper, so overwhelmingly suburbanized, seemed to her full of wonderful romance. Nothing was there in that soft light that did not seem passionately beautiful. Someone was clipping a hedge close by, and the gentle flip-flip of the shears was golden music to her. The rich scent of the cut evergreen was like nectar. From an open window came the chatter of children’s voices and the muffled hum of a gramophone, and she suddenly awoke to the realization of how wonderful a thing a gramophone can be. The long vistas of concrete pavement with their alternating cracks making two lines of tapering perspective were to her among the most beautiful visions she had ever seen. And out in the High Road--the common, condemned, despised High Road--all was poetry and romance. Trams passed like golden meteors flying through space; the last rays of the evening sun had picked out a certain upstairs window in the King’s Head and turned it into a crimson star. The King’s Head was no longer a public-house; it was a lighthouse, a beacon flashing hope and welcome on the long pale road whither the blue tram-lines sped to infinity. And over the roofs the moon was splashing in streams of silver foam. Bockley, that great, straggling, drab, modern metropolitan suburb was no longer itself, but a city gleaming with strange magic. She did not go straight home, but wandered amongst the stream of strollers along the High Road towards the Forest. She was amazed at the astonishing loveliness of this place, where she had been born and had lived and worked and dreamed. She was thrilled at the passionate beauty that was exuding from every house and building like some rare essence. She had always taken it for granted: Bockley is an ugly place. And now it seemed that Bockley was transfigured into a thing of wild, tumultuous beauty, as if the flesh had fallen away and revealed a soul of serene wonderment. Bockley! The very word became subtle and mysterious, like a password or the sacred formula that frees the powers of magic!