cism. Such is the illogical quality of humanity
that Holsten, fresh from work that was like a petard under the seat
of current civilisation, saw these changes with regret. He had come up
Heath Street perhaps a thousand times, had known the windows of all the
little shops, spent hours in the vanished cinematograph theatre, and
marvelled at the high-flung early Georgian houses upon the westward
bank of that old gully of a thoroughfare; he felt strange with all these
familiar things gone. He escaped at last with a feeling of relief from
this choked alley of trenches and holes and cranes, and emerged upon the
old familiar scene about the White Stone Pond. That, at least, was very
much as it used to be.

There were still the fine old red-brick houses to left and right of
him; the reservoir had been improved by a portico of marble, the
white-fronted inn with the clustering flowers above its portico still
stood out at the angle of the ways, and the blue view to Harrow Hill
and Harrow spire, a view of hills and trees and shining waters and
wind-driven cloud shadows, was like the opening of a great window to
the ascending Londoner. All that was very reassuring. There was the same
strolling crowd, the same perpetual miracle of motors dodging through
it harmlessly, escaping headlong into the country from the Sabbatical
stuffiness behind and below them. There was a band still, a women's
suffrage meeting--for the suffrage women had won their way back to the
tolerance, a trifle derisive, of the populace again--socialist orators,
politicians, a band, and the same wild uproar of dogs, frantic with the
gladness of their one blessed weekly release from the back yard and
the chain. And away along the road to the Spaniards strolled a vast
multitude, saying, as ever, that the view of London was exceptionally
clear that day.

Young Holsten's face was white. He walked with that uneasy affectation
of ease that marks an overstrained nervous system and an under-exercised
body. He hesitated at the White Stone Pond whether to go to the left of
it or the right, and again at the fork of the roads. He kept shifting
his stick in his hand, and every now and then he would get in the way of
people on the footpath or be jostled by them because of the uncertainty
of his movements. He felt, he confesses, 'inadequate to ordinary
existence.' He seemed to himself to be something inhuman and
mischievous. All the people about him looked fairly prosperous, fairl