d then to
stay--if I went eastward towards Piccadilly, women who seemed then to my
boyish inexperience softly splendid and alluring, murmured to me as
they passed. Extraordinarily life unveiled. The very hoardings clamoured
strangely at one's senses and curiosities. One bought pamphlets and
papers full of strange and daring ideas transcending one's boldest; in
the parks one heard men discussing the very existence of God, denying
the rights of property, debating a hundred things that one dared not
think about in Wimblehurst. And after the ordinary overcast day, after
dull mornings, came twilight, and London lit up and became a thing of
white and yellow and red jewels of light and wonderful floods of golden
illumination and stupendous and unfathomable shadows--and there were
no longer any mean or shabby people--but a great mysterious movement of
unaccountable beings....

Always I was coming on the queerest new aspects. Late one Saturday night
I found myself one of a great slow-moving crowd between the blazing
shops and the flaring barrows in the Harrow Road; I got into
conversation with two bold-eyed girls, bought them boxes of chocolate,
made the acquaintance of father and mother and various younger brothers
and sisters, sat in a public-house hilariously with them all, standing
and being stood drinks, and left them in the small hours at the door
of "home," never to see them again. And once I was accosted on
the outskirts of a Salvation Army meeting in one of the parks by a
silk-hatted young man of eager and serious discourse, who argued against
scepticism with me, invited me home to tea into a clean and cheerful
family of brothers and sisters and friends, and there I spent
the evening singing hymns to the harmonium (which reminded me of
half-forgotten Chatham), and wishing all the sisters were not so
obviously engaged....

Then on the remote hill of this boundless city-world I found Ewart.

III

How well I remember the first morning, a bright Sunday morning in early
October, when I raided in upon Ewart! I found my old schoolfellow in
bed in a room over an oil-shop in a back street at the foot of Highgate
Hill. His landlady, a pleasant, dirty young woman with soft-brown eyes,
brought down his message for me to come up; and up I went. The room
presented itself as ample and interesting in detail and shabby with a
quite commendable shabbiness. I had an impression of brown walls--they
were papered with brown paper--of a