on, his engagement would be revealed, and all would
be immensely impressed by his self-restraint and his good taste, and the
marriage would occur, and he would be a London architect, an established
man--at the mature age of, say, twenty-two.

No cloud would have obscured the inward radiance caused by the lovely
image of Marguerite and by his confidence in himself, had it not been
for those criticisms of the world. He had moods of being rather gravely
concerned as to the world, and as to London. He was recovering from the
first great attack of London. He saw faults in London. He was capable of
being disturbed by, for example, the ugliness and the inefficiency of
London. He even thought that something ought to be done about it. Upon
this Sunday morning, fresh from visions of Venice, and rendered a little
complacent by the grim execution of the morning's programme of work, he
was positively pained by the aspect of Redcliffe Gardens. The Redcliffe
Arms public-house, locked and dead, which was the daily paradise of
hundreds of human beings, and had given balm and illusion to whole
generations, seemed simply horrible to him in its Sunday morning coma.
The large and stuffy unsightliness of it could not be borne. (However,
the glimpse of a barmaid at an upper window interested him pleasantly
for a moment.) And the Redcliffe Arms was the true gate to the stucco
and areas of Redcliffe Gardens. He looked down into the areas and saw
therein the furtive existence of squalor behind barred windows. All the
obscene apparatus of London life was there. And as he raised his eyes to
the drawing-room and bedroom stories he found no relief. His eyes could
discover nothing that was not mean, ugly, frowzy, and unimaginative. He
pictured the heavy, gloomy, lethargic life within. The slatternly
servants pottering about the bases of the sooty buildings sickened and
saddened him. A solitary Earl's Court omnibus that lumbered past with
its sinister, sparse cargo seemed to be a spectacle absolutely
tragic--he did not know why. The few wayfarers were obviously prim and
smug. No joy, no elegance, anywhere! Only, at intervals, a feeling that
mysterious and repulsive wealth was hiding itself like an ogre in the
eternal twilight of fastnesses beyond the stuccoed walls and the grimy
curtains.... The city worked six days in order to be precisely this on
the seventh. Truly it was very similar to the Five Towns, and in
essentials not a bit better.--A sociolog