Wally stuck his hands into his pockets. He nursed the package against his thigh. Sloane Square, that waste of concrete, grey and gritty in the afternoon, invaded his mind’s vacancy. The discomfort of a wrong environment, the forms of class fixed in a definite mould, upset his natural indifference. It was too far distant to the big green pool, that home of an instinctive and at least theoretically classless splashing. Sloane Square reminded Wally Collins that perhaps he lived on sufferance.

Some way back in time lay the street in Bethnal Green, the dip in the road between the yellow houses where the big red bus appeared from Holborn, out of the high world of plate glass and leisurely women. You took that for granted, as something the bus suggested. Saturday nights, the barrows flared in Bethnal Green. There were the aniseed balls and the stiff bloaters. Or you pushed your face against the fish-shop window, in a rich haze of anticipation, already feeling the grease on your mouth and the intruding strain of vinegar. All this had its origin and place, Saturday night in Bethnal Green. Rooted in the back streets, you got to envy, then to hate the rootless. A saxophone in a back room made its own emotional comment out of a crackle of cooking fat. Later, the loosening of the roots, the slow tugging of circumstance, the sensation that you were floating yourself, even if in a sixpenny palais crammed with sweaty, hopeful tarts cancelled out the bitterness. Wally Collins was seldom bitter. Sometimes over girls, but more often not. There were more dames than could go round.

Rootless by achievement, Wally chose also the different skin. It came to him easily enough, the tight, slick suitings that snoosed along his hips, the hat forgotten on the back of his head. He paused at corners, Shaftesbury Avenue or Times Square, pleased with his own effect in glass. This was as much his own achievement as the idiom he used. He had an ear for the quick phrases, the phrases that showed you got around. His voice had acquired, over its native insolence, the more noticeable Manhattan veneer. That bloody Yank, Collins, they said. It made him grin. Sez you, he smiled. It tickled him to remember the back street in Bethnal Green, it made him stick out his chest like a barrel, over the buttocks the cloth almost bursting as he walked. Because all this, the disguise, whether Yankee ways or the flashy line, was symptomatic of emancipation. Wally had bought this, cheaply in fact, dearly in many private, under-the-skin ways. He had bought it in the clubs, on the sidewalks of Manhattan. Somewhere on Ninth Avenue, in a small five-dollar room, he had peeled off another, a more authentic Collins.

Out of Sloane Square, Wally recovered confidence. It was a matter of association. He could adapt himself in time, even to the set formulas of the rooted rich, a tradition of stone, rather than that of the big green pool. The motion of his body, slipping through the cold air, made him feel he could aspire. Perhaps it was just side. Or a sense of his own virtue, the little package he held against his thigh. Anyway, he didn’t give a damn. He even made a private noise into the face of Eaton Square.