jg^ ANGEL PAVEMENT

always a chance that there might be, somewhere in the
middle of it, bored and lonely, a wonderful girl who
would suddenly smile back at him.

He drifted from speaker to speaker with the crowd,
which was largely composed of youths like himself, all
feeling pleasantly superior, with a sprinkling of aggres-
sive dialecticians and religious and political fanatics.
There was a fantastic old man in a greenish frock-coat
who banged a large chart and talked in a high sing-song
that left five words out of six quite unintelligible. His
subject—of all things—was shorthand. v, Turgis stared
at him for a minute or two, concluded that he was mad,
and moved on. The next meeting, a large one, was
political, and the only words Turgis caught—"What
about Russia, where your socialism, my friends, has b^en
put into practice?''—drove him away at once. Then
there was a tiny group of people round a harmonium,
played by a young man with bulging eyes and a strag-
gling beard. They were drearily singing a hymn, and
nobody was taking any notice of them. Next to1 them,
one of those involved discussions, typical of the place,
was in heated progress, and the audience, in its own
ironical fashion, was enjoying it. All that Turgis, at
the back, could hear was the speaker himself, a young
man with spectacles and long yellow hair who had some-
thing to do with the Catholic Church, who kept crying:
"One mewment, my friend, just one mewment! Kindly
allow me to speak. Yes, yes, but one mewment! You
have asked me if I would considah such a person insane.
Now, one mewment!" Turgis lingered for some time at
this meeting. There were one or two nice girls in the
crowd, but not one of them was by herself. It was no
good. He would have to find a pal.