't know at the time either how much appearances were all the
while in the melting-pot or what wealth of reaction on them I was laying
up. I cherish, for love of the unbroken interest, all the same, the
theory of certain then positive and effective prefigurements, because it
leaves me thus free for remarking that I knew where I was, as I may put
it, from the moment I saw the state of the London to come brought down
with the weight of her abdication of her genius. It not unnaturally may
be said that it hasn't been till to-day that we _see_ her genius in its
fulness--throwing up in a hundred lights, matters we practically
acknowledge, such a plastic side as we had never dreamed she possessed.
The genius of accommodation is what we had last expected of
her--accommodation to anything but her portentous self, for in _that_
connection she was ever remarkable; and certainly the air of the
generalised, the emulous smart modern capital has come to be written
upon her larger and larger even while we look.

The unaccommodating and unaccommodated city remains none the less
closely consecrated to one's fondest notion of her--the city too
indifferent, too proud, too unaware, too stupid even if one will, to
enter any lists that involved her moving from her base and that thereby,
when one approached her from the alien _positive_ places (I don't speak
of the American, in those days too negative to be related at all)
enjoyed the enormous "pull," for making her impression, of ignoring
everything but her own perversities and then of driving these home with
an emphasis not to be gainsaid. Since she didn't emulate, as I have
termed it, so she practised her own arts altogether, and both these ways
and these consequences were in the flattest opposition (_that_ was the
happy point!) to foreign felicities or foreign standards, so that the
effect in every case was of the straightest reversal of them--with
black for the foreign white and white for the foreign black, wet for the
foreign dry and dry for the foreign wet, big for the foreign small and
small for the foreign big: I needn't extend the catalogue. _Her_
idiosyncrasy was never in the least to have been inferred or presumed;
it could only, in general, make the outsider provisionally gape. She sat
thus imperturbable in her felicities, and if that is how, remounting the
stream of time, I like most to think of her, this is because if her
interest is still undeniable--as that of overgrown things g