r week
or two, she would be back in it all and would see all the lamps coming
out and the jingling cabs and the heavy lumbering omnibuses, and that
she would hear again the sharp crying of the newspaper boys and the
ringing of church bells and the thud of the horses down the Row and the
hum of voices above the orchestra during the intervals of some play.

She thought of Portland Place and the park and the Round Church and the
little shops and Oxford Circus and the buses tumbling down Regent Street
into Piccadilly and then tumbling down again into Pall Mall. From
Portland Place she seemed to look down over the whole of London and to
see it like a jewel, with its glow dazzling the night sky--

She knew now that although she hated her grandmother she did not hate
the Portland Place house and she was glad that Roddy had taken a flat
near there. No other part of London would ever be quite the same to her
as that was: it would always be home to her more than any other place in
the world, with its space and air and sense of life crowding around it.

And, as she walked, she was fired with the desire to have some real
active share in the London life; not in the sham life of pleasure and
entertainment, but to be working, as all kinds of men must be working,
with London behind them, influencing them, sometimes depressing them,
sometimes exalting them, always moving within them.

That was a fine ambition to work towards a greater London, a greater,
finer, truer world, and whether you were politician or artist or
journalist or merchant or novelist or clerk or philanthropist, still by
your working honestly you would deserve your place in that company.

If she could have some share in such things, then her miserable doubts
and forebodings would vanish in a vision too bright and glorious to
contain them--

As she walked her face glowed and her body moved as though it could
continue thus, swinging through the clear air, for all time.

She determined that on this very evening she would tell Roddy about
Breton. Whatever might be the result life in the future should be clear
of Beaminster confusions. She would even ask Roddy to help her about
Breton, to influence, perhaps, her grandmother with regard to him--

Then, in a few days, Nita Raseley would be gone, and, afterwards, she
would discipline all her wit and energy towards establishing a fine
relationship with Roddy.

Something had, throughout all these months, been wrong; she