"And yours—yours had the terror and the enchantment of a spirit, a human spirit lost in a dream. A beautiful and dreadful dream. I'd forgotten; and now I remember. You look like that now."
"That's your fault, Nina. You make me remember my old dreams."
"Owen," she said, "don't you want to get away? Don't these walls press on you and hurt you?"
They were passing down a side-street, between rows of bare houses, houses with iron shutters and doors closed on the dingy secrets, the mean mysteries of trade; houses of high and solitary lights where some naked window-square hung golden in a wall greyer than the night.
"Not they," he said. "I've lost that sense. Look there—you and I could go slap through all that, and it wouldn't even close over us; it would simply disappear."
They had come into the lighted Strand. A monstrous hotel rose before them, its masonry pale, insubstantial in the twilight, a delicate framework for its piled and serried squares of light. It showed like a hollow bastion, filled with insurgent fire, flung up to heaven. The buildings on either side of it were mere extensions of its dominion.
"Your sense is a sense I haven't got," said she.
"I lose it sometimes. But it always comes back."
"Isn't it—horrible?"
"No," he said. "It isn't."