But after spending all her available funds on an evening blouse and borrowing a cloak from Jan she found herself at the large theatre impressed only by the collected mass of the audience. The sense of being small and alone, accentuated by the presence of little Mr. Shatov, neatly in evening dress at her side, persisted, growing, until the curtain rose. So long as they had wandered about London and sat together in small restaurants, the world had seemed grouped about them, the vast ignored spectator of a strange romance. But in this huge enclosure, their small, unnoticed, unquestioned presences seemed challenged to account for themselves. All these unmoved people, making the shut-in air cold with their unconcern, even when they were hushed with the strange appealing music of the overture, were moving with purpose and direction because of their immense unconsciousness. Where were they going? What was it all about? What, she asked herself, with a crowning pang of desolation, as the curtain went relentlessly up, were he and she to be or do in this world? What would they become, committed, identified, two small desolate, helpless figures, with the crowding mass of unconscious life? “I find something of grandeur in the sober dignity of this apartment. It is mediæval Germany at its best.” “It is very dark.” “Wait, wait. You shall see life and sunshine, all in the most beautiful music.” The sombre scene offered the consolation, suddenly insufficient, that she had found in the past in sliding idly into novels, the restful sense of vicarious life. She had heard of a wonderful philosophy in Faust, and wondered at Mr. Shatov’s claim for its charm. But there was, she felt, no space, on the stage, for philosophy. The scene would change, there was “charm” and sunshine and music ahead. This scene itself was changing as she watched. The old man talking to himself was less full of meaning than the wonderful German interior, the pointed stonework and high, stained windows, the carved chairs and rich old manuscripts. Even as he talked, the light from the night-sky, pouring down outside on a beautiful old German town, was coming in. And presently there would be daylight scenes. The real meaning of it all was scenes, each with their separate, rich, silent significance. The scenes were the story, the translation of the people the actual picture of them as they were by themselves behind all the pother...... She set herself, drifting in solitude away from the complications of the present, to watch Germany. The arrival of Mephistopheles was an annoying distraction suggesting pantomine. His part in the drama was obscured by Mr. Shatov’s whispered eulogies of Chaliapin, “the only true Mephistopheles in Europe.” It certainly seemed right that the devil should have “a most profound bass voice.” The chanting of angels in Paradise, she suggested, could only be imagined in high clear soprano, whereat he maintained that women’s