Alec Segal talked. For one hour, two hours, they paced from corner to dark corner of Chester Street. There were but few interruptions from Harry and none from Philip. Only, as Alec talked, Philip felt sometimes that he would like to lie down on the cold kerb to cry--simply, childishly, to cry. And he felt creeping round him like a mist, a deadlier loneliness than had ever beset his heart, a loneliness that now crept and eddied through his being in chill wisps. Oh for the brown eyes of his mother, so innocent and so wide with knowledge! For the bloom was fading from the world; the freshness was passing away. Friendship was passing away. Hitherto he had stood alone, self-sufficient. Now the new preoccupations must assail him, wean him from his old friends. Wean him, oh sorrowful, oh, surely false, from his mother! Lead him towards insubstantial things waiting somewhere to hold him! And these things reached towards his friends, were interposed between them and him. They had been complete and single once, these friends, despite all the flaws in their unity. They were but provisional and dependent now, as he was himself to be henceforward. Pain which had a core of delight, delight which was gilded dust! The three youths parted. As they moved in different ways, night, it seemed to Philip, engulfed them separately bringing unbridgeable division. Night swallowed something of boyhood. Manhood came stalking towards Philip out of the vast. Manhood placed a finger on his young forehead. A sad boy slept that night in Angel Street, sad and wise. CHAPTER XII Dorah was a tall, raw-boned woman, carrying all the implicit angles of Reb Monash to an explicit extreme. In the civil strife at Angel Street her sympathy had always been on the side of tradition and Reb Monash, as against licence and Philip. Channah likewise had, in a weak and somewhat hopeless way, taken sides. Not openly, not with unabashed self-declaration, and far less through philosophy than sentiment, she had been steadily at Philip's side--when, at least, she was not absorbed in her collection of Vesta Tilley post cards and her long waitings at gallery doors for the performances of Lewis Waller or Martin Harvey.