He was waiting outside the pompous wrought iron gates of the cemetery for a streetcar. He climbed on a half empty car and watched the people straggle in as it drew near to the subway entrance. There were old women with spiteful lips and peevish, shifty eyes, flashy young men in checked caps, lanternjawed girls, sallow, seedy fathers of families. Once, after a long argument, he had asked Wenny: But what do you want? and Wenny had looked round the car with eager eyes and said: Not to be myself, I guess, to be anybody, any one of those people but myself. In the subway Fanshaw looked, furtively so that they should not notice him, from face to face, noting the tired skin round their eyes. Comes from drudgery in offices and factories, he was telling himself, always regimented, under orders, and then, in the evening the sudden little spurt of human brilliance, shopgirls and little clerks and ditchdiggers walking merrily through twilight streets. Tremont before theatre time, or at six o'clock with the dome of the State House glowing through dusky trees. Then the night; mystery of doorways, gangs of boys loafing sullenly under arclights at corners, grassing in the cemetery, furtive loves over newlydug graves, always afraid of the policeman striding slowly down his beat; electric signs and burlesque shows, Pretty Girls Upstairs, lumpy women, stuffed in pink tights, twitching lewdly at the end of a smoke-rancid hall ... We can do better than that, Nan and I, escape all this grinding ugliness, make ourselves a garden walled against it all, shutting out all this garish lockstep travesty of civilization. Land where it is always afternoon. Afternoons reading on the balcony of a palace in Venice, vague splendors, relics from the Doges, Aretino, Titian, and Nan with her hair brushed back from her forehead, in a brocaded dress like a Florentine princess on a casone. Park Street. Fanshaw got to his feet and shuffled in a jostling stream of people out the car. * * * * Nan had been playing Pelleas. Fanshaw sat looking out of the window into the glassy twilight in which a few stars already shimmered like bubbles ready to burst. The music and the incredible fresh green of the leaves in the darkening Fenway had brought on a mood of queer sensibility, so that he felt very happy and almost on the verge of tears. He got to his feet and walked over to the piano, where he stood awkwardly watching Nan's long fingers flash across the keys. Then he took her gently by the shoulders and said: "Come and look at the twilight ... It's unbearably poignant, this violence of spring." They stood side by side in the window looking out at the darkening trees. "Nan, it'll be rather fun, won't it, setting up a ménage? And think how delightfully absurd the wedding will be and all that." "Yes, I think it'll be fun. Will your mother hate me dreadfully?" "Poor mother, she's like a child. She'll get used to you and be fearfully attached to you in no time."