On Thursday afternoon she stood for a moment considering her course. There was the Underground, which was always quickest, or there was the drive above the golden summer dust on the swinging height of a motor-bus. She decided upon the second alternative, and slipped into infinity. She was cut off from duty, surrounded by strangers, unmoored from her niche in the world.
This was the moment of her day which Stella liked best; in it she could lose her own identity. She let her hands rest on her lap and her eyes on the soft green of the new-born leaves. She hung balanced on her wooden seat between earth and sky, on her way to Russian music.
The brief and tragic youth of London trees was at its loveliest. Kensington Gardens poured past her like a golden flame. The grass was as fresh as the grass of summer fields, swallows flitted over it, and the broad-shouldered elms were wrapped delicately in a mist of green.
Hyde Park Corner floated beneath her; the bronze horses of victory, compact and sturdy, trundled out of a cloudless sky. St George's Hospital, sun-baked and brown, glowed like an ancient palace of the Renaissance. The traffic surged down Hamilton Place and along Piccadilly as close packed as migratory birds. The tower of Westminster Cathedral dropped its alien height into an Italian blue sky; across the vista of the green park and all down Piccadilly the clubs flashed past her, vast, silver spaces of comfort reserved for men, full of men. Stella did not know very much about men who lived in clubs. Cicely said they were very wicked and danced the tango and didn't want women to have votes; but Stella thought they looked as if they had attractions which rivaled these disabilities.
Probably she would see some of them less kaleidoscopically at the opera later.
Even men who danced the tango went to hear Chaliapine. It wasn't only his voice; he was a rage, a prairie fire. All other conversation became burned stubble at his name.
Piccadilly Circus shot past her like a bed of flowers.
The City was very hot, and all the world was in the streets, expansive and genial. It was the hour when work draws to an end and night is still far off. Pleasure had stretched down the scale and included workers. People who didn't dance the tango bought strawberries and flowers off barrows for wonderful prices to take home to their children.
In the queue extending half-way down Drury Lane, Eurydice, passionate and heavy-eyed, was waiting for Stella.
"If you hadn't come soon," she said, drawing Stella's arm through her own, "something awful would have happened to me. I got a messenger-boy to stand here for an hour to keep your place. The suspense has been agony, like waiting for the guillotine."