career. Ishmael heard Gladstone in the Bill's defence defying an attack
by Lowe, whilst Mr. Disraeli leant back with a slight smile on his face,
which was a blot of pallor beneath his dark, oiled ringlets. Ishmael was
stirred, yet in him something felt amazement and disappointment. These
were only men after all, not demigods, and some of them were peevish,
some rude, some bored and inattentive. The whole thing seemed somehow
childish; it was difficult to believe, except later when Bright's golden
tongue was speaking, that in this place the nation was governed....
Afterwards he was with the crowd, borne helplessly along, that wrecked
the Hyde Park railings in their anger that the hastily constructed
Ministry of Derby should still let Reform hang in air. Yet all these
affairs of the nation only affected Ishmael from the outside, for he was
beginning to be at his most personal.

Turns of singing and dancing interested him less than plays where there
was a definite and necessarily keenly personal story. The characters
were all occupied with their feelings for each other, never with
theories or conditions. There was one exception to this rule, though
Ishmael kept that to himself--he went often to see a little dancer whose
turn only lasted ten minutes, while the particular moment of it for
which he went was over in a flash, the moment when, whirling round and
round very quickly, her short filmy skirts stood out and were nothing
but a misty circlet about her, so that she gave the illusion of having
nothing to break the slim straight lines of her. She seemed nude with an
elfin nudity that charmed him while it did not inflame, or if it did,
only with the subtle inflammation of the mind, which can withstand such
onslaughts for many years before a sudden reaction of the body shows the
connection between the two. Ishmael, who took no interest in damsels in
tights or in the exuberant proportions of the "frail" ladies that amused
Killigrew, found himself waiting for that moment every evening, and his