In the great hive of London you can see them meeting, hungrily snatching a moment from their separate labours which are just a means to an end. In the City she comes, lighting his heart with her beauty, and she goes, leaving him feeling that the light has been turned off inside him. At Kew in lilac time you will find them in sweet green avenues; the red buses bear them and their Dream to country places; and one day you will meet them in a tube train bending self-consciously over a furniture catalogue.... * * * Dante and Beatrice came out of their dream beside the Thames and walked away. Dante's new boots squeaked. Arm-in-arm they went along the sun path, two ordinary little actors in the great play, with that stillness about them that suggests how full two hearts can be. If one could only peep into their lives again in ten years' time. That, however, is tempting Fate. In Uncle's Shop Outside on its rusty supports hung the sign of the proud Medici--three gold balls. Inside the pawnbroker's shop nothing was proud, except perhaps a grandfather clock that stood in a corner like an old aristocrat who has buttoned his coat, cocked his hat, and decided to go down hill with an air. For the rest--just junk lingering in this sordid, waiting-room atmosphere to be reclaimed and taken home. I looked at it and saw it as junk; then I looked again, knew that some of it had been hard to part with, was, in fact, transmuted by affection so that its very frayed unloveliness brought tears to their eyes. Those cheap, badly-made china shepherdesses designed to simper across a mantelpiece at the girlish gallant whose flirtatious salute was ruined because the hand that once held his hat had vanished--how remarkable that anyone had made them, how remarkable that anyone had cared sufficiently to buy them! There they were in the pawnshop, and perhaps some poor woman scraping up four-pence interest to keep them hers, gazing at her bare mantelpiece, longing for their sugary smiles, the cheap, conventional romance of them.... * * * "Something'll happen soon," said the pawnbroker to me. "You just have to wait." So I waited for comedy or pathos in the dim crowded shop that smelt of undusted china and old boots. Beyond the stacked window--so full of clocks and fractious bronze horses, of watches and silly shaped silver vases--I saw a busy London district; people passing and repassing, tramcars at congested cross-roads, omnibuses, women shopping and stopping to talk, their baskets over their arms. I became aware of a man in a blue overcoat examining the window. "He's an old hand at 'popping' things," said the pawnbroker. "You know him then?" "Never seen him before; but I can tell." "How?"