But last spring I met the girl in the flat below me. Her name was Elsie—Winwood, I think. Of one thing, however, I am sure; she had cold grey eyes and auburn hair—an uncanny combination; but she was typical of the English girl, the girl who had been educated abroad. This girl and I came face to face on the stairs one day.
"Why do you always leave London at the best time of the year?" she asked me.
"I am young," I confessed. "In the spring I live by night, and one may only sleep in London at night."
"But you do not know London," she told me.
She smiled intimatingly and disappeared into the gloom of her studio.
That night I thought of Arthur Symons's "London Nights." Nobody in any city in the world had more subtly caught the spirit of youthful buoyancy, the spirit of romantic evanescence, the spirit of midnight abandon. Could it be that he was but
