The Equinox (Volume I, Number I)

THE DREAM CIRCEAN reeling against the houses, crying with laughter, too weak with laughter to stand straight. “ By-and-by they took pity, came forward, and released me from my unpleasant situation. “ But the shame of me, as I slunk away down the streets| I would not go home that night at all, ashamed to face my own servants. “T told myself, in the end, that this was a rare accident; but for all that there must have remained a slight stain upon the mirror of perfect chivalry. In the old days when they taught logic in the schools one learnt how delicate a flower was a ‘universal affirmative.’ “It was some uneventful months after this ‘ tragedy of the ideal’ that Iwas again walking home very late. I had been to the Jardin des Plantes in the afternoon, and, dining in that quarter, had stayed lingering on the bridge watching the Seine. The moon dropped down behind the houses—with a start I realised that I must gohome. There was some danger, you understand, of footpads. Nothing, however, occurred until—I always preferred to walk through the narrow streets ; there is romance in narrow streets !—I found myself in the Rue des Quatre Vents ; not a stone’s-throw from this house, as you know. “T had been thinking of my previous misadventure, and, with the folly of youth, had been indulging in a reverie of the kind that begins ‘If only.’ If only she had been a princess ravished by a wicked ogre. Ifonly... Ifonly... “On the south side of the Rue des Quatre Vents is a house standing well back from the street, with a railing in front of it—a common type, is it not? But what riveted my 115