A man who stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comedy.
More especially this attractive unreality fell upon it about nightfall, when the extravagant roofs were dark against the afterglow and the whole insane village seemed as separate as a drifting cloud.

This again was more strongly true of the many nights of local festivity, when the little gardens were often illuminated, and the big Chinese lanterns glowed in the dwarfish trees like some fierce and monstrous fruit.
And this was strongest of all on one particular evening, still vaguely remembered in the locality, of which the auburn-haired poet was the hero.

It was not by any means the only evening of which he was the hero.
On many nights those passing by his little back garden might hear his high, didactic voice laying down the law to men and particularly to women.

The attitude of women in such cases was indeed one of the paradoxes of the place.

Most of the women were of the kind vaguely called emancipated, and professed some protest against male supremacy.
Yet these new women would always pay to a man the extravagant compliment which no ordinary woman ever pays to him, that of listening while he is talking.