ANGEL PAVEMENT

lady, now this time you've gone a bit too far. It's my
turn/ But mindjew, even then I didn't say what f
could have said. Not one word about Gravesend crossed
my lips to her, though it was there on the top of my

tongue.'

Turgis looked at her with disgust. Silly old geezer!

At last the waitress came. She was a girl with a nose
so long and so thickly powdered that a great deal of it
looked as if it did not belong to her, and she was tired,
exasperated, and ready at any moment to be snappy.
She took the order—and it was for plaice and chips, tea,
bread and butter, and cakes: the great tea of the whole
fortnight—without any enthusiasm, but she returned in
time to prevent Turgis from losing any more temper.
For the next twenty minutes, happily engaged in grap-
pling with this feast, he forgot all about girls, and when
the food was done and he was lingering over his third
cup of tea and a cigarette, though no possible girls came
within sight, he felt dreamily content. His mind swayed
vaguely to the tune the orchestra was playing. Adven-
ture would come; and for the moment he was at ease,
lingering on its threshold.

From this tropical plateau of tea and cakes, he de-
scended into the street, where the harsh night air
suddenly smote him. The pavements were all eyes and
thick jostling bodies; at every corner, the newspaper
sellers cried out their football editions in wailing voices
of the doomed; cars went grinding and snarling and
roaring past; and the illuminated signs glittered and
rocketed beneath the forgotten faded stars. He arrived
at his second destination, the Sovereign Picture Theatre,
which towered at the corner like a vast spangled wed-
ding-cake in stone. It might have been a twin of that