perpetually changing, surrounded Graham;
his mind was confused and darkened by an incessant tumult, by the cries
and enigmatical fragments of the social struggle that was as yet
only beginning. Everywhere festoons and banners of black and strange
decorations, intensified the quality of his popularity. Everywhere he
caught snatches of that crude thick dialect that served the illiterate
class, the class, that is, beyond the reach of phonograph culture, in
their common-place intercourse. Everywhere this trouble of disarmament
was in the air, with a quality of immediate stress of which he had no
inkling during his seclusion in the Wind-Vane quarter. He perceived that
as soon as he returned he must discuss this with Ostrog, this and the
greater issues of which it was the expression, in a far more conclusive
way than he had so far done. Perpetually that night, even in the earlier
hours of their wanderings about the city, the spirit of unrest and
revolt swamped his attention, to the exclusion of countless strange
things he might otherwise have observed.

This preoccupation made his impressions fragmentary. Yet amidst so much
that was strange and vivid, no subject, however personal and insistent,
could exert undivided sway. There were spaces when the revolutionary
movement passed clean out of his mind, was drawn aside like a curtain
from before some startling new aspect of the time. Helen had swayed his
mind to this intense earnestness of enquiry, but there came times when
she, even, receded beyond his conscious thoughts. At one moment, for
example, he found they were traversing the religious quarter, for
the easy transit about the city afforded by the moving ways rendered
sporadic churches and chapels no longer necessary--and his attention was
vividly arrested by the facade of one of the Christian sects.

They were travelling seated on one of the swift upper ways, the place
leapt upon them at a bend and advanced rapidly towards them. It was
covered with inscriptions from top to base, in vivid white and blue,
save where a vast and glaring kinematograph transparency presented a
realistic New Testament scene, and where a vast festoon of black to show
that the popular religion followed the popular politics, hung across the
lettering Graham had already become familiar with the phonotype writing
and these inscriptions arrested him, being to his sense for the
most part almost incredible blasphemy. Among the less offensive were
"Salv