“Making it comfortable,” Michael repeated. “My first impression was just the reverse. I suppose it’s no good asking you people to give me lunch?”
“Rather, of course,” Maurice declared. “Castleton, it’s your turn to buy lunch.”
“One extraordinary thing, Michael,” said Castleton, “is the way in which Maurice can always produce a mathematical reason for my doing something. You’d think he kept a ledger of all our tasks.”
“We can send old Mother Wadman if you’re tired,” Maurice offered. Castleton, however, seemed to think he wanted some fresh air; so he and Cunningham went out to buy things to eat.
“I was fairly settled before old Castleton turned up,” Maurice explained, “but we shall be three times as comfortable when he’s finished. He’s putting up divans.”
Maurice indicated with a gesture the raw material on which Castleton was at work. They were standing by the window which looked out over multitudinous roofs.
“What a great rolling sense of human life they do give,” said Michael. “A sea really with telegraph poles and wires for masts and rigging, and all that washing like flotillas of small boats. And there’s the lighthouse,” he pointed to the campanile of Westminster Chapel.
“The sun sets just behind your lighthouse, which is a very bad simile for anything so obscurantist as the Roman Church,” said Maurice. “We’re having such wonderful green dusks now. This is really a room made for a secret love-affair, you know. Such nights. Such sunny summer days. What is it Browning says? Something about sparrows on a housetop lonely. We two were sparrows. You know the poem I mean. Well, no doubt soon I shall meet the girl who’s meant to share this with me. Then I really think I could work.”
Michael nodded absently. He was wondering if an attic like this were not the solution of what might happen to him and Lily when they were married. Whatever bitterness London had given her would surely be driven out by life in a room like this with a view like this. They would be suspended celestially above all that was worst in London, and yet they would be most essentially and intimately part of it. The windows of the city would come twinkling into life as incomprehensibly as the stars. Whatever bitterness she had guarded would vanish, because to see her in a room like this would be to love her. How well he understood Maurice’s desire for a secret love-affair here. Nobody wanted a girl to perfect Plashers Mead. Even Guy’s fairy child at Plashers Mead had seemed an intrusion; but here, to protect one’s loneliness against the overpowering contemplation of the life around, love was a necessity. And perhaps Maurice would begin to justify the ambition his friends had for his career. It might be so. Perhaps himself might find an inspiration in an attic high up over roofs. It might be. It might be so.
“What are you thinking about?” Maurice asked.