500 ANGEL PAVEMENT

was and whom she was with: it was bad to realise that
for the next two or three hours she would be dancing
with that tall fellow who sometimes brought a car, but it
was much worse to be miles away from her and to know
nothing. When he was pursuing her, though only in this
strange, shadowy fashion, Lena and he alone were real,
the only real human beings in a City that had been
turned, with all its winter magnificence of lighted lamps
and shop windows, golden buses, glittering night signs,
and shining wet pavements, into an illuminated jungle,
When he tried to put her out of his mind, however, there
was nothing in the whole city that would let him forget.
It had been tantalising, maddening enough before he
had met Lena, when he had gone wandering about the
streets in an amorous hunger, but now it was a hundred
times worse. Everything he saw spoke to him of women
and love. The shops he passed were brilliant with hats
and clothes that Lena might wear; they showed him her
stockings and underclothes; they were piled high with
her entrancing little shoes; they invited him to look at
her powder-bowls, her lipstick, her scent bottles; there
was nothing she wore, nothing she touched, they did not
thrust under their blazing electric lights. The theatres
and picture houses shouted to him their knowledge of
girls and love. The hoardings were covered with illustra-
tions, nine feet high, of happy romances. The very
newspapers, under cover of a pretended interest in Palm
Beach or feminine athletics, gave him day by day photo-
graphs of nearly naked girls with figures like Lena's.
And in and out of the buses, tube trains, theatres, dance-
halls, restaurants, teashops, public-houses, taxis, villas,
flats, went boys and their sweethearts, girls and their
lovers, men and their wives, smiling at one another,