“And I’ll tell you another thing,” the younger man pleaded. “You remember what you said to me once about women receiving a kiss. Don’t you? Why, that instead of our being charmed by the fascination of their bearing at such a time, we should immediately doubt them if their confusion has any GRACE in it—that awkward bungling was the true charm of the occasion, implying that we are the first who has played such a part with them.”
“It is true, quite,” said Knight musingly.
It often happened that the disciple thus remembered the lessons of the master long after the master himself had forgotten them.
“Well, that was like her!” cried Stephen triumphantly. “She was in such a flurry that she didn’t know what she was doing.”
“Splendid, splendid!” said Knight soothingly. “So that all I have to say is, that if you see a good opening in Bombay there’s no reason why you should not go without troubling to draw fine distinctions as to reasons. No man fully realizes what opinions he acts upon, or what his actions mean.”
“Yes; I go to Bombay. I’ll write a note here, if you don’t mind.”
“Sleep over it—it is the best plan—and write to-morrow. Meantime, go there to that window and sit down, and look at my Humanity Show. I am going to dine out this evening, and have to dress here out of my portmanteau. I bring up my things like this to save the trouble of going down to my place at Richmond and back again.”
Knight then went to the middle of the room and flung open his portmanteau, and Stephen drew near the window. The streak of sunlight had crept upward, edged away, and vanished; the zoophytes slept: a dusky gloom pervaded the room. And now another volume of light shone over the window.
“There!” said Knight, “where is there in England a spectacle to equal that? I sit there and watch them every night before I go home. Softly open the sash.”
Beneath them was an alley running up to the wall, and thence turning sideways and passing under an arch, so that Knight’s back window was immediately over the angle, and commanded a view of the alley lengthwise. Crowds—mostly of women—were surging, bustling, and pacing up and down. Gaslights glared from butchers’ stalls, illuminating the lumps of flesh to splotches of orange and vermilion, like the wild colouring of Turner’s later pictures, whilst the purl and babble of tongues of every pitch and mood was to this human wild-wood what the ripple of a brook is to the natural forest.