“Is it true what they’re saying in the clubs to-day, that you’ve been across every single bridge in London?”
“Quite true,” he replied, with deprecating modesty. “And through the Rotherhithe Tunnel, too,” he added quietly.
And the old adventurer, whose eyes had gazed upon so many and so foreign cities, was silent, seeing of a sudden that youth must have its day nor will be gainsaid.
But despite his triumphs, Gaveston was not completely satisfied. What did it all mean to him, this blazing, roaring Babylon? How was it all to fit into the intricate mosaic of élan and flair and verve that made up the essential ffoulis. London and Oxford.… Oxford and London.…
“They seem irreconcilable,” he whispered to himself one evening as he stood adream by the fountain in Piccadilly Circus, the high tide of humanity plashing in dusky waves about him.
But were they?
And with a touch of elfin phantasy all his own, he interchanged in his robust imagination the two sculptured monuments of these two irreconcilable cities, and hey presto!—below the monacal mullions of Wallace he perceived the ever-tiptoe Eros, aiming his darts with fatal strategy at the haunters of those mediæval shadows and destroying in a night an austerity that was the handiwork of unnumbered centuries—while here, round the transplanted Martyrs’ Memorial the flower-sellers would cease their raucousness, and the struggling painted crowd their Neronian debauchery, awed into silence before the steepling and pinnacled emblem of Oxford’s and England’s rejection of the Scarlet Woman of the Seven Hills.…
“Vi’lets, sweet vi’lets … all fresh.… Buy a bunch, kind sir!” the shrill cockney voice had floated to his ears from the pedestal behind him.