long at the hour of four o'clock or four-thirty, I
could see that in everyone of these "breakfast rooms"--their technical
name--the tea tray and the tea cups were set out in readiness. I
received from this trivial and natural circumstance an impression of a
dull life, laid out in dreadful lines of patterned uniformity, of a life
without adventure of body or soul._

_Then, the family party. It got into the tram down Hackney way. There
were father, mother and baby; and I should think that they came from a
small shop, probably from a small draper's shop. The parents were young
people of twenty-five to thirty-five. He wore a black shiny frock
coat--an "Albert" in America?--a high hat, little side whiskers and dark
moustache and a look of amiable vacuity. His wife was oddly bedizened in
black satin, with a wide spreading hat, not ill-looking, simply
unmeaning. I fancy that she had at times, not too often, "a temper of
her own." And the very small baby sat upon her knee. The party was
probably going forth to spend the Sunday evening with relations or
friends._

_And yet, I said to myself, these two have partaken together of the
great mystery, of the great sacrament of nature, of the source of all
that is magical in the wide world. But have they discerned the
mysteries? Do they know that they have been in that place which is
called Syon and Jerusalem?--I am quoting from an old book and a strange
book._

_It was thus that, remembering the old story of the "Resurrection of the
Dead," I was furnished with the source of "A Fragment of Life." I was
writing "Hieroglyphics" at the time, having just finished "The White
People"; or rather, having just decided that what now appears in print
under that heading was all that would ever be written, that the Great
Romance that should have been written--in manifestation of the
idea--would never be written at all. And so, when Hieroglyphics was
finished, somewhere about May 1899, I set about "A Fragment of Life" and
wrote the first chapter with the greatest relish and the utmost ease.
And then my own life was dashed into fragments. I ceased to write. I
travelled. I saw Syon and Bagdad and other strange places--see "Things
Near and Far" for an explanation of this obscure passage--and found
myself in the lighted world of floats and battens, entering L. U. E.,
crossing R and exiting R 3; and doing all sorts of queer things._

_But still, in spite of all these shocks and changes, the "notion"