<>S6 ANGEL PAVEMENT was only just room for him in the gallery. Another ten minutes and he would have been too late, a thought that gave him a good deal of pleasure as he climbed the steps, among all the eager, chattering symphony concert-goers. 3 His seat was not very comfortable, high up too, but he liked the look of the place, with its bluey-green walls and gilded organ-pipes and lights shining through holes in the roof like fierce sunlight, its rows of little chairs and music stands, all ready for business. It was fine. He did not buy a programme—they were asking a shilling each for them, and a man must draw a line somewhere —but spent his time looking at the other people and listening to snatches of their talk. They were a queer mixture, quite different from anybody you were likely to see either in Stoke Newington or Angel Pavement; a good many foreigners (the kind with brown baggy stains under their eyes), Jewy people, a few wild-looking young fellows with dark khaki shirts and longish hair, a sprinkling of quiet middle-aged men like himself, and any number of pleasant young girls and refined ladies; and he studied them all with interest. On one side, of him were several dark foreigners in a little party, a brown wrinkled oldish woman who never stopped talk- ing Spanish or Italian or Greek or some such language, a thin young man who was carefully reading the pro- gramme, which seemed to be full of music itself, and, on the far side, two yellow girls. On the other side, his neighbour was a large man whose wiry grey hair stood straight up above a broad red face, obviously an Eng-