"I always talk; it relieves me. You have no idea how nice she is; so frail, so white--a white blonde, a Seraphita. But you haven't read Balzac; you do not know those white women of the North. '_Plus blanche que la blanche hermine_,' etc. So pure is she that I cannot think of kissing her without sensations of sacrilege. My lips are not pure enough for hers. I would I were chaste. I never was chaste." Mike laughed and chattered of everything. Words came from him like flour from a mill. The _Pilgrim_ was published on Wednesday. Wednesday was the day, therefore, for walking in the Park; for lunching out; for driving in hansoms. Like a fish on the crest of a wave he surveyed London--multitudinous London, circulating about him; and he smiled with pleasure when he caught sight of trees spreading their summer green upon the curling whiteness of the clouds. He loved the Park. The Park had always been his friend; it had given him society when no door was open to him; it had been the inspiration of all his ambitions; it was the Park that had first showed him ladies and gentlemen in all the gaud and charm of town leisure. There he had seen for the first time the panorama of slanting sunshades, patent leather shoes, horses cantering in the dusty sunlight, or proudly grouped, the riders flicking the flies away with gold-headed whips. He loved the androgynous attire of the horsewomen--collars, silk hats, and cravats. The Park appealed to him intensely and strangely as nothing else did. He loved the Park for the great pasture it afforded to his vanity. It was in the Park he saw the fashionable procuress driving--she who would not allow him to pay even for champagne in her house; it was in the Park he met the little actress who looked so beseechingly in his face; it was in the Park he met fashionable ladies who asked him to dinner and took him to the theatre; it was in the Park he had found life and fortune, and, saturated with happiness, with health, tingling with consciousness of his happiness, Mike passed among the various crowd, which in its listlessness seemed to balance and air itself like a many-petalled flower. But much as the crowd amused and pleased him, he was more amused and pleased with the present vision of his own personality, which in a long train of images and stories passed within him. He loved to dream of himself; in dreams he entered his soul like a temple, seeing himself in various environment, and acting in manifold circumstances.