had delighted in the few remains of the past that he could find
still surviving on the suburb's edge, in the grave old houses that stood
apart from the road, in the moldering taverns of the eighteenth century,
in the huddled hamlets that had preserved only the glow and the sunlight
of all the years that had passed over them. It appeared to him that
vulgarity, and greasiness and squalor had come with a flood, that not
only the good but also the evil in man's heart had been made common and
ugly, that a sordid scum was mingled with all the springs, of death as of
life. It would be alike futile to search amongst these mean two-storied
houses for a splendid sinner as for a splendid saint; the very vices of
these people smelt of cabbage water and a pothouse vomit.

And so he had often fled away from the serried maze that encircled him,
seeking for the old and worn and significant as an antiquary looks for
the fragments of the Roman temple amidst the modern shops. In some way
the gusts of wind and the beating rain of the night reminded him of an
old house that had often attracted him with a strange indefinable
curiosity. He had found it on a grim grey day in March, when he had gone
out under a leaden-molded sky, cowering from a dry freezing wind that
brought with it the gloom and the doom of far unhappy Siberian plains.
More than ever that day the suburb had oppressed him; insignificant,
detestable, repulsive to body and mind, it was the only hell that a
vulgar age could conceive or make, an inferno created not by Dante but by
the jerry-builder. He had gone out to the north, and when he lifted up
his eyes again he found that he had chanced to turn up by one of the
little lanes that still strayed across the broken fields. He had never
chosen this path before because the lane at its outlet was so wholly
degraded and offensive, littered with rusty tins and broken crockery, and
hedged in with a paling fashioned out of scraps of wire, rotting timber,
and bending worn-out rails. But on this day, by happy chance, he had fled
from the high road by the first opening that offered, and he no longer
groped his way amongst obscene refuse, sickened by the bloated bodies of
dead dogs, and fetid odors from unclean decay, but the malpassage had
become a peaceful winding lane, with warm shelter beneath its banks from
the dismal wind. For a mile he had walked quietly, and then a turn in the
road showed him a little glen or hollow, watered by such