so long as Mrs. Seal was in the room served
to set her brain in motion, so that she dispatched her morning's work
much as usual. At one o'clock she was surprised to find how efficiently
she had dealt with the morning. As she put her hat on she determined
to lunch at a shop in the Strand, so as to set that other piece of
mechanism, her body, into action. With a brain working and a body
working one could keep step with the crowd and never be found out for
the hollow machine, lacking the essential thing, that one was conscious
of being.

She considered her case as she walked down the Charing Cross Road. She
put to herself a series of questions. Would she mind, for example, if
the wheels of that motor-omnibus passed over her and crushed her
to death? No, not in the least; or an adventure with that
disagreeable-looking man hanging about the entrance of the Tube station?
No; she could not conceive fear or excitement. Did suffering in any form
appall her? No, suffering was neither good nor bad. And this essential
thing? In the eyes of every single person she detected a flame; as if a
spark in the brain ignited spontaneously at contact with the things
they met and drove them on. The young women looking into the milliners'
windows had that look in their eyes; and elderly men turning over books
in the second-hand book-shops, and eagerly waiting to hear what the
price was--the very lowest price--they had it, too. But she cared
nothing at all for clothes or for money either. Books she shrank from,
for they were connected too closely with Ralph. She kept on her way
resolutely through the crowd of people, among whom she was so much of an
alien, feeling them cleave and give way before her.

Strange thoughts are bred in passing through crowded streets should the
passenger, by chance, have no exact destination in front of him, much
as the mind shapes all kinds of forms, solutions, images when listening
inattentively to music. From an acute consciousness of herself as an
individual, Mary passed to a conception of the scheme of things in
which, as a human being, she must have her share. She half held a
vision; the vision shaped and dwindled. She wished she had a pencil and
a piece of paper to help her to give a form to this conception which
composed itself as she walked down the Charing Cross Road. But if she
talked to any one, the conception might escape her. Her vision seemed to
lay out the lines of her life until death in a way which