His mood made him thoroughly, savagely approve of Mitcham Mews. It had character; not a nice character, still an appreciable individual quality. Almost all the other habitations he knew of in London were uniforms, disguises. Even the delicious little houses in Westminster were consciously Georgian or Queen Anne, part of an attitude. . . . He was wearying of it all. He had caught something of Kurt's healthiness and desired to do something that contained adventure and risk, and the exercise of more than habitual skill. He hated being at the beck and call of any man or woman who signed to him, and sometimes he gave himself the pleasure of ignoring them if he did not like their looks. Once when he had been summoned by whistle to a house in Bayswater, and its door was opened to emit a large Jew and an expansive Gentile lady of pleasure bent on an evening's snouting in the trough of the West End, he put his fingers to his nose, and drove off as hard as he could. That helped to put him on better terms with his rebellious physical existence. He had insulted it. That was something. But he could not subdue his excitement. He found two poor little lovers in the Park one night, and took them out into the country free of charge. That squared the outrage on the Jew. It was an active step toward pure romance. The little lovers had occupied less and less space in the car as he brought them home under the moon, and his engine sang a droning bass to the song they were living. And when he reached home he was brought hard up against the fact that he was Ann's acknowledged lover, and that she was going to have a child by him. It had, he knew, nothing in common with the Jew, but also, he could not help feeling, it had lamentably little in common with the young lovers. It was a fact like the nose on his face, a part of himself, no getting away from it; a fact, however, that brought no illumination. The nose on his face, he thought, must have been once a brilliant discovery. It must have meant a revelation of noses that, among other marvels, there were such things. There was some zest in the fantastic agility of his intelligence, and this kept him going.