“Here we are,” I said, and she pulled up beneath the lamp by The Leather Butler in East Chapel Street. From the footboard a lane of low houses and shops stretched in a vague, squalid line towards the open Market Place at one end and the darkness of the mews at the other; somehow like an etching in a clouded light by an uncertain hand. Bits of newspapers and torn placards, the nameless odours of yesterday’s economies. The wind that came from Hampstead Heath could find no way into Shepherd’s Market, and it lay still as a tramp sleeping. Cats watched us intently from the middle distance, and a striped cat leapt with a scream from the shadow of the door of my old house. Gerald’s light was on. “What’s that mean?” Iris whispered. She seemed to be frightened, and she said sharply: “Why are you looking at me like that?” “I was just thinking,” I told her, “that if one could judge by appearances, which of course one must never do, in that white cloak in this mean lane you look as nearly an angel as this world could ever see.” “Don’t let’s mock the angels. What does it mean, Gerald’s light being on?” “Only what it has always meant, that I must turn it out.” “Ah, you’ve been very good to Gerald....” And I am glad that, just then, I said that I was very fond of Gerald. Then we were on the narrow landing of my old flat, in the darkness. The musty stillness of that little old house brought six years of nights into my mind, and I wondered how people ever regretted their first youth, those intolerable uncertainties and enthusiasms that stare at you from the dead past like condemned gargoyles. The incapability of youth goes on long enough, Heaven knows, if not so long as the savagery of childishness. In the darkness I could feel the soft ermine of her cloak against me, and that faint dry scent whose name I shall now never know. She was very, very still, and I could not even hear her breathing.