at destroyed the Parliament, there are very few traces of the old
thoroughfare of Whitehall or the Government region thereabout, but there
are plentiful drawings to scale of its buildings, and the great hole in
the east of London scarcely matters. That was a poor district and very
like the north and the south. . . . It will be possible to reconstruct
most of it. . . . It is wanted. Already it becomes difficult to recall
the old time--even for us who saw it.'

'It seems very distant to me,' said the girl.

'It was an unwholesome world,' reflected Karenin. 'I seem to remember
everybody about my childhood as if they were ill. They were ill.
They were sick with confusion. Everybody was anxious about money and
everybody was doing uncongenial things. They ate a queer mixture of
foods, either too much or too little, and at odd hours. One sees how ill
they were by their advertisements. All this new region of London they
are opening up now is plastered with advertisements of pills. Everybody
must have been taking pills. In one of the hotel rooms in the Strand
they have found the luggage of a lady covered up by falling rubble and
unburnt, and she was equipped with nine different sorts of pill and
tabloid. The pill-carrying age followed the weapon-carrying age. They
are equally strange to us. People's skins must have been in a vile
state. Very few people were properly washed; they carried the filth of
months on their clothes. All the clothes they wore were old clothes; our
way of pulping our clothes again after a week or so of wear would have
seemed fantastic to them. Their clothing hardly bears thinking about.
And the congestion of them! Everybody was jostling against everybody in
those awful towns. In an uproar. People were run over and crushed by
the hundred; every year in London the cars and omnibuses alone killed or
disabled twenty thousand people, in Paris it was worse; people used to
fall dead for want of air in the crowded ways. The irritation of London,
internal and external, must have been maddening. It was a maddened
world. It is like thinking of a sick child. One has the same effect of
feverish urgencies and acute irrational disappointments.

'All history,' he said, 'is a record of a childhood....

'And yet not exactly a childhood. There is something clean and keen
about even a sick child--and something touching. But so much of the
old times makes one angry. So much they did seems grossly stupid,
obstinately, outrag