of
her grandfather's, 'The British make slums wherever they go because in
every British mind there is a slum.'

She could find relief in the books, but she could not stay the welling
up of the mysterious forces which swamped the clarity of her mind and
made her usually swift intuition sluggish.

Very thankful was she that she had steered Charles into the Imperium
before this cataclysm broke in her.... She could well be alone to sort
out if possible the surfeit of new impressions from which she was
suffering. She no longer had thoughts but only obsessions. London....
London.... London.... The roaring traffic: the crowds of people:
Coventry Street by night: the illuminated theatres: the statue in
Piccadilly Circus: the hotel in which she and Charles had stayed on
their first night in London: the painted faces of the women: policemen:
commissionaires: wonderful cars lit up at night, gliding through the
streets with elegant ladies in evening dress reclining at their ease,
bored, mechanical, as hard and mechanical as the cars that carried them
through the streets: the drunken women fighting outside her door: the
woman opposite her windows who kept a canary in a cage and watered so
lovingly the aspidistra on her window-sill: tubes: lifts: glaring
lights and white tiles.... London.... London.... London....

Through it all there ran a thread of struggling, conscious purpose
which kept her from misery and made it impossible for her to succumb.
Deep in her heart she knew that she could not; that she had escaped;
that it would never be for her an awful, a terrible, an overwhelming
thing to be a woman.

With that knowledge there came an exultation, a pride, a triumphant
sense of having come through an almost fatal peril, the full nature of
which had yet to be revealed. And she had wrestled through it alone.
Her childish detestation of her womanhood was gone. She accepted it,
gloried in it as her instrument and knew that she would never be lost
in it.

For ever in her mind that crisis was associated with Kropotkin's escape
from prison, and she was full of a delighted gratitude to the little
bookseller who had lent her the book, the second volume, the first
having been borrowed.

Immeasurably increased was her understanding through this sudden
convulsion of her life, and she was very proud of the loyalty to her
instinct which had made her wrestle through it alone; and now, when she
saw women absorbed in external thi