TURGIS SEES HER l6l

about for pleasure and not simply going to and from
the office. Everywhere he saw them, never missed seeing
them. His mind was for ever busy with their images,
for ever troubled by them. No matter where he went,
he was tantalised, the path underneath his feet a narrow
dusty track of wilderness, but all hung about with rich
forbidden clusters of feminine fruit, shrinking, wither-
ing, vanishing at a touch.

Turgis was by temperament a lover. His thoughts
never left the other sex long; happiness had for him a
feminine shape; the real world was illuminated by the
bright glances of girls; and at any moment, one of them
might reveal to him an enchanted life they could share
together. It would be easy to see him as a lonely lad
seeking sympathy in that crowd in which he was lost.
It would be just as easy to see him as a figure of furtive
lusts, whose mind descended and there lived eagerly in
an underworld of tiny mean contacts, seemingly acci-
dental pressures of the arm and the foot. Yet behind
both these figures was the lover. And this, in spite of
his shabbiness and unprepossessing looks, the shiny
baggy suit and the frayed tie, the open mouth, that slight
pastiness and spottiness, that faint grey film which
seemed to cover and subdue his physical self. He was
no dapper lady-killer. But then if Turgis, even within
his scanty means, did not try very hard to make himself
superficially attractive to the sex that despises crumpled
clothes, matted hair, pasty cheeks, youth that has lost
all vividness and glow, it was because he believed that
the cry from within, urgent, never ceasing, must receive
an answer. He knew that he had little to offer on the
surface, was nothing to look at, nobody in particular,
but he felt that inside he was different, he was wonderful,