Edwin followed. More beer, more tobacco, more of the curious composite smell, more positively vegetable than human, that he had begun to associate with trampled pieces of paper, probably the debris of bags that had once held fruit of some kind. The little man pushed his way deftly through the crowd. He was so small and inoffensive that nobody seemed to notice him; and indeed the leading characteristics of this crowd’s vast consciousness seemed to be good humour. The bookies in their white hats, the many-buttoned costers, the sweating men in black coats, the very waiters in the refreshment tents, staggering under leaning towers of beef plates, seemed determined to enjoy themselves in spite of the heat and the smell of their neighbours under the white-hot sky. Edwin, too, forgot his anxieties. The vastness of the crowd subtly shielded him. He felt newly secure, and his spirit was caught up into its excitement and good humour. He even turned down his collar. And all the time his mind exulted in a queer sense of clarity, an intoxication due, perhaps, to his successful daring. In this state he found all his surroundings vivid and amusing; all colours and sounds came to him with a heightened brilliancy. He smiled, and suddenly found that a young gipsy woman with her head in a bright handkerchief was smiling back at him. He thought it was jolly that people should smile like that. He thought what jolly good luck it was meeting his guide, the shiny shoulders of whose frock coat he saw in front of him. His quick mind had placed the little man already: a solicitor’s clerk in some ancient worm-eaten Inn of Court, a relic of the dark, lamp-litten London of Dickens: a city of yellow fog and cobbled pavements shining in the rain: of dusty, cobwebbed law-stationers’ windows and cosy parlours behind them where kettles were singing on the hob of a toasting fire, and punch was mixed at night. It seemed to him that he could have met no more suitable person than his friend; for really all this racing crowd were making a sort of Cockney holiday of the kind that the greatest Victorian loved most dearly. He began to find words for it all. He _must_ find words for it, for it would be such fun writing to his mother about it. If he dared. . . . It would be time enough to write a letter about it when the business was finished without disaster. There was always the possibility that he would be found out and expelled. Even if that should happen, he thought, he would like to tell his mother. . . .