omething worth while--and found it,
moreover, under his very nose. In some dull, meaningless fashion he had
always known this part of London, and been familiar with its external
aspects. Now suddenly he perceived that the power had come to him of
seeing it all in a different way. The objects he beheld, inanimate
and otherwise, had specific new meanings for him. His mind was stirred
pleasurably by the things they said to him.

He looked at all the contents of the windows as he passed; at the
barrows of the costers and hawkers crowding up the side-streets; at
the coarse-haired, bare-headed girls and women standing about in their
shawls and big white aprons; at the weakling babies in their arms or
about the thick, clumsy folds of their stained skirts; at the grimy,
shuffling figures of their men-folk, against the accustomed background
of the public-house corner, with its half-open door, and its fly-blown
theatre-bills in the windows; at the drivers of the vans and carts,
sleepily overlooking the huge horses, gigantic to the near view as some
survival from the age of mammoths, which pushed gingerly, ploddingly,
their tufted feet over the greasy stones; at foul interiors where
through the blackness one discerned bent old hags picking over refuse;
at the faces which, as he passed, made some special human appeal to
him--faces blurred with drink, faces pallid with under-feeding,
faces worn into masks by the tension of trouble, faces sweetened by
resignation, faces aglow with devil-may-care glee...he looked, as it
were, into the pulsing heart of something which had scarcely seemed
alive to him before.

Eventually, he found himself halting at the door of his sister's
book-shop. A new boy stood guard over the stock exposed on the shelf and
stands outside, and he looked stonily at the great man; it was evident
that he was as far from suspecting his greatness as his relationship.
It pleased Thorpe for a little to take up one book after another, and
pretend to read from it, and force the boy to watch him hard. He had
almost the temptation to covertly slip a volume into his pocket, and
see what the lad would do. It was remarkable, he reflected with
satisfaction--this new capacity within him to find drama in trifles.

There floated into his mind the recollection of some absurd squabble he
had had with his sister about the sign overhead. He stepped back a
few paces and looked up at it. There were the old words--"Thorpe,
Bookseller"--