“I say, let’s get out of this, it’s so hot. Come away from the crowd.” He pulled Tony by the arm. “All right.” Tony shook the old man by the hand. “Good-bye, I’ll come and watch you fish one morning. By Jove, it is hot! but what fun! Where shall we go?” “I propose bed,” said Maradick, rather grimly. He felt suddenly out of sympathy with the whole thing. It was as though some outside power had slipped the real Maradick, the Maradick of business and disillusioned forty, back into his proper place again. The crowd became something common and even disgusting. He glanced round to assure himself that no one who mattered had been witness of his antics as he called them; he felt a little annoyed with Tony for leading him into it. It all arose, after all, from that first indiscreet departure from the hotel. He now felt that an immediate return to his rooms was the only secure method of retreat. The dance stood before him as some horrible indiscretion indulged in by some irresponsible and unauthorised part of him. How could he! The ludicrous skinny neck of the shrieking hen pointed the moral of the whole affair. He felt that he had, most horribly, let himself down. “Yes, bed,” he said. “We’ve fooled enough.” But for Tony the evening was by no means over. The dance had been merely the symbol of a new order of things. It was the physical expression of something that he had been feeling so strangely, so beautifully, during these last few days. He had called it by so many names—Sincerity, Simplicity, Beauty, the Classical Spirit, the Heroic Age—but none of these names had served, for it was made up of all these things, and, nevertheless, was none of them alone. He had wondered at this new impulse, almost, indeed, new knowledge; and yet scarcely new, because he felt as if he had known it all, the impulse and the vitality and the simplicity of it, some long time before. And now that dance had made things clearer for him. It was something that he had done in other places, with other persons, many hundreds, nay, thousands of years ago; he had found his place in the golden chain that encircled the world. And so, of course, he did not wish to go back. He would never go back; he would never go to sleep again, and so he told Maradick. “Well, I shall go,” said Maradick, and he led the way out of the crowd. Then Tony felt that he had been rude. After all, he had persuaded Maradick to come, and it was rather discourteous now to allow him to return alone. “Perhaps,” he said regretfully, “it would be better. But it is such a splendid night, and one doesn’t get the chance of a game like that very often.” “No,” said Maradick, “perhaps it’s as well. I don’t know what led me; and now I’m hot, dusty, beastly!”