I suppose, began to feel the grayness of the as yet
unseen dawn of a new day. But as I helped her out of the cab in
Battersea, she said she had thoroughly enjoyed her "fluffy" evening, and
thanked me very prettily. I returned in the cab as far as Westminster,
and there dismissed the man with the last of my seven guineas, having
decided to walk from there to my Bloomsbury lodging.

For a Socialist, my conduct was certainly peculiar. There were two of
us. We had had two meals, one of which was as totally unnecessary as the
other was overelaborate. And we had spent an hour or two in watching an
incredibly stupid and vulgar performance. And over this I had spent a
sum upon which an entire family could have been kept going for a couple
of months. But there were scores of people in London that night--some of
them passed me in cabs and carriages, as I walked from the Abbey toward
Fleet Street--who had been through a similar programme and spent twice
as much over it as I had. It was an extraordinarily extravagant period;
and it seemed that the less folk did in the discharge of their national
obligations as citizens, the more they demanded, and the more they
spent, in the name of pleasure.

The people who passed me, as I made my way eastward, were mostly in
evening dress, pale and raffish-looking. Many, particularly among the
couples in hansoms, were intoxicated, and making a painful muddle of
such melodies as those we had listened to at the music hall. Overeaten,
overdrunken, overexcited, overextravagant, in all ways figures of
incontinence, these noisy Londoners made their way homeward, pursued by
the advancing gray light of a Sabbath dawn in midsummer.

And Beatrice loved everything foreign, because the foreigners had none
of our stupid British Puritanism! And the British public was mightily
pleased with its Government, "The Destroyers," because they were cutting
down to vanishing point expenditure upon such superfluous vanities as
national defence, in order to devote the money to improving the
conditions in which the public lived, and to the reducing of their heavy
burdens as citizens of a great Empire. Money could not possibly be
spared for such ornamentation as ships and guns and bodies of trained
men. We could not afford it!

As I passed the corner of Agar Street a drunken cabdriver, driving two
noisily intoxicated men in evening dress, brought his cab into collision
with a gaunt, wolf-eyed man who had been scouring t