As he sat at his desk in the King’s Inns he thought what changes those eight years had brought.  The friend whom he had known under a shabby and necessitous guise had become a brilliant figure on the London Press.  He turned often from his tiresome writing to gaze out of the office window.  The glow of a late autumn sunset covered the grass plots and walks.  It cast a shower of kindly golden dust on the untidy nurses and decrepit old men who drowsed on the benches; it flickered upon all the moving figures—­ on the children who ran screaming along the gravel paths and on everyone who passed through the gardens.  He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as always happened when he thought of life) he became sad.  A gentle melancholy took possession of him.  He felt how useless it was to struggle against fortune, this being the burden of wisdom which the ages had bequeathed to him.

He remembered the books of poetry upon his shelves at home.  He had bought them in his bachelor days and many an evening, as he sat in the little room off the hall, he had been tempted to take one down from the bookshelf and read out something to his wife.  But shyness had always held him back; and so the books had remained on their shelves.  At times he repeated lines to himself and this consoled him.

When his hour had struck he stood up and took leave of his desk and of his fellow-clerks punctiliously.  He emerged from under the feudal arch of the King’s Inns, a neat modest figure, and walked swiftly down Henrietta Street.  The golden sunset was waning and the air had grown sharp.  A horde of grimy children populated the street.  They stood or ran in the roadway or crawled up the steps before the gaping doors or squatted like mice upon the thresholds.  Little Chandler gave them no thought.  He picked his way deftly through all that minute vermin-like life and under the shadow of the gaunt spectral mansions in which the old nobility of Dublin had roystered.  No memory of the past touched him, for his mind was full of a present joy.

He had never been in Corless’s but he knew the value of the name.  He knew that people went there after the theatre to eat oysters and drink liqueurs; and he had heard that the waiters there spoke French and German.  Walking swiftly by at night he had seen cabs drawn up before the door and richly dressed ladies, escorted by cavaliers, alight and enter quickly.  They wore noisy dresses and many wraps.  Their faces were powdered and they caught up their dresses, when they touched earth, like alarmed Atalantas.  He had always passed without turning his head to look.  It was his habit to walk swiftly in the street even by day and whenever he found himself in the city late at night he hurried on his way apprehensively and excitedly.  Sometimes, however, he courted the causes of his fear.  He chose the darkest and narrowest streets and, as he walked boldly forward, the silence that was spread about his footsteps troubled him, the wandering, silent figures troubled him; and at times a sound of low fugitive laughter made him tremble like a leaf.