He had driven to his home at something in excess of the legal maximum, hating her (as he thought--the most solid proof of his love for her) and hating himself for being such a fool as he felt himself to be. The necessity for strategy in talking to his mother helped to bring him within the range of ordinary well-ordered life once more, and he had ridden his soul on the curb, so to speak, ever since; but now his mother had gone to bed, and here he was stretched at full length on his chair, having abandoned himself to his passion--thrown out every ounce of ballast in order that he might get a little nearer to the stars that were as soft as pearls above him. He had ceased to be astonished at himself. He had reached that rarer atmosphere where the conditions of life are altogether different from those that prevail on lower levels, and where extravagance of thought is simply the result of breathing the air. His intoxication took the form of feeling that he was on the brink of a great happiness--that he was a king on the eve of a great victory--that he was so considerable a person in the world that he could carry out with a high hand every purpose in life. In his heart was all the swagger of those braggart warriors strutting about in armour and feathers on the walls of Troy or beneath them. And in this condition of intoxication and its consequent hallucination he remained until the stars of the one hour of the summer night waxed paler than pearls in the exquisite dawn of the summer day. The nightingale that had been singing in the early night had long ago become hushed. From a distant meadow there came the sound of the unmelodious corncrake. There was a little cheeping and rustling among the ivy of the walls, and then came a blackbird’s syrupy contralto from among the laurels of the shrubbery, and far away the delicious liquid ripples of a lark--two larks--three--the pearly air was thrilling with the melody of larks and with the flutings of thrushes, and the cooings of the wood pigeons, long before the sultans of the farmyards sent forth their challenges to be passed on and on like the ripple on a lake, until the last could be but faintly heard coming from the height of the Downs. He sat there listening to everything, and scarcely conscious of the melting of the night into the dawn. There had been no darkness at any time of that June night, and the dawn was only like all the pearls of the sky melting in the liquid air. At last he got up from his seat and walked to the balustrade of the terrace, looking forth over the white mists that curled and rose from the lawns and the meadows beneath. He felt that his new day had arisen for him. He went upstairs to his room, and when he had got into bed, he was asleep within five minutes.