Over all was an illusion of immensity.
Nine o'clock of an April night--the time when a great city has most power over those that love her; the time when she lowers her voice and subdues her brilliance, intimating that she is not what she seems; when she makes herself unearthly and insubstantial, veiling her grossness in the half-transparent night.

Like some consummate temptress, she plays the mystic, clothing herself with light and darkness, skirting the intangible, hinting at the infinities, flinging out the eternal spiritual lure, so that she may better seduce the senses through the soul.

And Rickman was too young a poet to distinguish clearly between his senses and his imagination, or his imagination and his soul.
He stood in Piccadilly Circus and regarded the spectacle of the night.
He watched the groups gathering at the street corners, the boys that went laughing arm in arm, the young girls smiling into their lovers' eyes; here and there the faces of other women, dubious divinities of the gas-light and the pavement, passing and passing.

A very ordinary spectacle.

But to Rickman it had an immense significance, a rhythmic, processional resonance and grandeur.