nd thereafter we try no more to change them, we just love 'em and enjoy
'em!

Some such psychological process went on in my consciousness that
morning. As I walked briskly through the streets I began to look out
more broadly around me. It was really a perfect spring morning, the air
crisp, fresh, and sunny, and the streets full of life and activity. I
looked into the faces of the people I met, and it began to strike me
that most of them seemed oblivious of the fact that they should, by
good rights, be looking downcast and dispirited. They had cheered their
approval the night before when the speakers had told them how miserable
they were (even acknowledging that they were slaves), and yet here they
were this morning looking positively good-humoured, cheerful, some of
them even gay. I warrant if I had stepped up to one of them that morning
and intimated that he was a slave he would have--well, I should have
had serious trouble with him! There was a degree of sociability in those
back streets, a visiting from window to window, gossipy gatherings in
front area-ways, a sort of pavement domesticity, that I had never
seen before. Being a lover myself of such friendly intercourse I could
actually feel the hum and warmth of that neighbourhood.

A group of brightly clad girl strikers gathered on a corner were
chatting and laughing, and children in plenty ran and shouted at their
play in the street. I saw a group of them dancing merrily around an
Italian hand-organ man who was filling the air with jolly music. I
recall what a sinking sensation I had at the pit of my reformer's
stomach when it suddenly occurred to me that these people some of them,
anyway, might actually LIKE this crowded, sociable neighbourhood! "They
might even HATE the country," I exclaimed.

It is surely one of the fundamental humours of life to see absurdly
serious little human beings (like D. G. for example) trying to stand
in the place of the Almighty. We are so confoundedly infallible in our
judgments, so sure of what is good for our neighbour, so eager to force
upon him our particular doctors or our particular remedies; we are so
willing to put our childish fingers into the machinery of creation--and
we howl so lustily when we get them pinched!

"Why!" I exclaimed, for it came to me like a new discovery, "it's
exactly the same here as it is in the country! I haven't got to make
over the universe: I've only got to do my own small job, and to look up
oft