to disconcerting bodily pains and another symptom.

'This must end!' I said, struggling to my feet.

I summoned the courage of an absolute disgust. I felt that the power
which had triumphed over my dejection and my irresolution and brought me
to London might carry me a little further.

Leaving the hotel, I crossed the Strand. Innumerable omnibuses were
crawling past. I jumped into one at hazard, and the conductor put his arm
behind my back to support me. He was shouting, 'Putney, Putney, Putney!'
in an absent-minded manner: he had assisted me to mount without even
looking at me. I climbed to the top of the omnibus and sat down, and the
omnibus moved off. I knew not where I was going; Putney was nothing but a
name to me.

'Where to, lady?' snapped the conductor, coming upstairs.

'Oh, Putney,' I answered.

A little bell rang and he gave me a ticket. The omnibus was soon full. A
woman with a young child shared my seat. But the population of the roof
was always changing. I alone remained--so it appeared to me. And we moved
interminably forward through the gas-lit and crowded streets, under the
mild night. Occasionally, when we came within the circle of an arc-lamp,
I could see all my fellow-passengers very clearly; then they were nothing
but dark, featureless masses. The horses of the omnibus were changed. A
score of times the conductor came briskly upstairs, but he never looked
at me again. 'I've done with you,' his back seemed to say.

The houses stood up straight and sinister, thousands of houses unendingly
succeeding each other. Some were brilliantly illuminated; some were dark;
and some had one or two windows lighted. The phenomenon of a solitary
window lighted, high up in a house, filled me with the sense of the
tragic romance of London. Why, I cannot tell. But it did. London grew to
be almost unbearably mournful. There were too many people in London.
Suffering was packed too close. One can contemplate a single affliction
with some equanimity, but a million griefs, calamities, frustrations,
elbowing each other--No, no! And in all that multitude of sadnesses I
felt that mine was the worst. My loneliness, my fear, my foolish youth,
my inability to cope with circumstance, my appalling ignorance of the
very things which I ought to know! It was awful. And yet even then, in
that despairing certainty of disaster, I was conscious of the beauty of
life, the beauty of life's exceeding sorrow, and I hugged it to me, like