The candles cast a lurid yellowish light; the shadows were deep; only the faces of those nearest the flame could be clearly distinguished. One table was surrounded by a boisterous group in the centre of which was a fat man in a frowsy wig. He had a malicious glint in his squinting eyes and was evidently of some importance. When he spoke the others listened with respect. This pompous personage was Edmund Curll, bookseller, whose coarse and infamous publications once brought him within the law. Curll, we are told, possessed himself of a command over all authors whatever; he caused them to write what he pleased; they could not call their very names their own. Curll was the deadly enemy of Pope and his friends, and his unlimited scurrility drew from the poet of Twickenham a retaliation every whit as coarse and as biting as anything the bookseller's warped mind ever conceived. Had Lavinia been told this was the notorious Curll, the name would have conveyed nothing. The quarrels of poets and publishers were to her a sealed book. All that she knew was that she disliked the man at first sight, while his vile speech made her ears tingle with shame. Despite the danger possibly awaiting her in the gloom of Paternoster Row she would have fled had not the sight of one of the group at the table rooted her to the spot. This was Lancelot Vane whom her maiden fancy had elevated into a god endowed with all the virtues and laden with misfortunes which had so drawn him towards her. Vane--alas that it should have to be written--had taken much wine--far too much! Lavinia knew the signs. Often in the old days in St. Giles had she seen them--the eyes unnaturally bright, the face unnaturally flushed, the laugh unnaturally empty. And she had pictured Vane so sad, so depressed! The sight of him thus came upon her as a shock. At first she was angry and then full of excuses for him. It was not his fault, she argued, but that of his companions and especially of the squint-eyed, foul-tongued man who no sooner saw that the bottle was getting low than he ordered another one. What could she do to help him? Nothing. He was out of her reach. She remembered how he looked when she first saw him at the Maiden Head inn. He would probably look like that again before the night was ended. She could not bear to gaze upon him as he was now and she crept away with the old wives' words in her mind--Providence looks after drunken men and babes. She stole from the lobby sad at heart. She had no longer the courage to face the dangers of the street. The deep shadow of great St. Paul's, sacred building though it was, afforded her no protection; it spoke rather of cut-throats, footpads, ruffians ready for any outrage. The din of voices, the sounds of brawling reached her from Cheapside. The London 'prentices let loose from toil and routine were out for boisterous enjoyment and may be devilry. She dared not go further eastward.