room seemed suddenly absurd. It was very dark, the wallpaper was of
a heavy-moulded variety, sombre in hue and covered with meaningless
figuring. The ceiling was oppressive. It, too, was moulded in some
fantastic manner. Several large faded oil-paintings hung on the wall. I
do not know why they hung there, they were hideous and meaningless as
well. The whole place was meaningless. It was the _meaninglessness_ that
seemed to leap out upon me wherever I turned my eyes. The fireplace
astounded me. It was a mass of pillars and super-structures and
carvings, increasing in complexity from within outwards, until it
attained the appearance of an ornate temple in the centre of which
burned a little coal. It was grotesque. On the topmost ledges of this
monstrous absurdity stood two vases. They bulged like distended
stomachs, covered on their outsides with yellow, green and black
splotches of colour. I recollected that I paid ten pounds apiece for
them. Under what perverted impulse had I done that? My memories became
incredible. I moved deliberately to the mantelpiece and seized the
vases. I opened the window and hurled them out on to the pavement. They
fell with a crash, and their fragments littered the ground.

Alice expressed no surprise.

"It is rather comic," said the Russian, "but where are you going to
live?"

"Alice and I will go and live by the sea. We have plenty to think about.
I feel as if I could never stop thinking, as if I had to dig away a
mountain of thought with a spade. Alice, we will go round to the house
agent now."

When Alice and I left the house the remains of the vases littered the
pavement at our feet. We walked down Harley Street. The house agent
lived in Regent Street. It was now a clear, crisp afternoon with a
pleasant tint of sunlight in the air. A newspaper boy passed, calling
something unintelligible in an excited voice. I stopped him and bought a
paper.

"What an inhuman noise to make," said Alice. "It seems to jar on every
nerve in my body. Do ask him to stop."

"You're making too much noise," I said to the lad. "You must call
softly. It is an outrage to scream like that."

He stared up at me, an impudent amazed face surmounting a tattered and
dishevelled body, and spoke.

"You two do look a couple of guys, wiv' yer blue faices. If some of them
doctors round 'ere catches yer, they'll pop yer into 'ospital."

He ran off, shrieking his unintelligible jargon.

"We must get to the sea," I