Here the amazing conversation ceased, partly maybe because it had achieved a certain degree of finality, certainly in part because this crisis in it synchronized with their entrance into the tightly packed tube lift at Piccadilly Circus Station. The journey home to Upton Rising did not favour its resumption. Catherine was amazed at her own intrepidity, astonished and angry in almost equal proportions at her absurd daring. And she was also trying to grasp the significance of what he had said. In the end she decided: It was a rather silly joke, and his replies were about as silly as my questions. The first-class compartment from Liverpool Street was empty save for the two of them. But the train stopped at all stations, and any intimate conversation was liable to sudden interruption. Catherine also was too chaotically minded to attempt to ruffle the finality with which the previous conversation had closed. She was content to chatter occasionally on trivial subjects and indulge in long intervals of uneloquent silence. It was nearly ten o’clock in an evening late in September, and the train passing from the urban to the suburban districts seemed to gather with it the rich cloying scent of autumn. It was quite warm, though the breeze that blew in occasionally from the open window was of a delightfully perfumed coolness. Far back whence they had come the myriad lights of London reflected a warm glow in the sky, and ahead over the broad belt of heath and woodland the sky was pale with a million stars. Station after station slunk into view and passed unostentatiously away; great sprawling vistas of suburb unfolded themselves with all the soft witchery of lamp-strewn residential roads; here and there the train swung over bridges and past terraces of winedark back gardens; the great suburban highways were swollen rivers of light. Suburb after suburb slipped by, like episodes in a crowded dream, suburbs that Catherine had never visited, or had only vaguely heard of, places as foreign and unrecognizable as Paris or Yokohama. And each one seemed weighed heavy with romance as the night sank upon it; each one seemed strangely, passionately beautiful. Ever and anon the train would glide effortlessly to a standstill at some half-deserted station with lamps that creaked in the breeze like the tuning of a hundred violins. And then off again into the scented twilight until Catherine, enchanted by the beauty of night, was too spell-bound to read the names on the stations, and so lost count of where she was.