these faces, all these contented faces; one towered intellectually above
them; one towered into regions of rarefaction. And down below they
enjoyed themselves. One understood life better; they better how to live.
That struck me then--in Oxford Street. There was the intense
good-humour, the absolute disregard of the minor inconveniences, of the
inconveniences of a crowd, of the ignominy of being one of a crowd.
There was the intense poetry of the soft light, the poetry of the
summer-night coolness, and they understood how to enjoy it. I turned up
an ancient court near Bedford Row.

"In the name of God," I said, "I will enjoy ..." and I did. The poetry
of those old deserted quarters came suddenly home to me--all the little
commonplace thoughts; all the commonplace associations of Georgian
London. For the time I was done with the meanings of things.

I was seeking Lea--he was not at home. The quarter was honeycombed with
the homes of people one knows; of people one used to know, excellent
young men who wrote for the papers, who sub-edited papers, who designed
posters, who were always just the same. One forgot them for a year or
two, one came across them again and found them just the same--still
writing for the same papers, still sub-editing the same papers,
designing the same posters. I was in the mood to rediscover them in the
privacies of their hearths, with the same excellent wives making fair
copies of the same manuscripts, with the same gaiety of the same
indifferent whiskey, brown or pale or suspicious-looking, in heavy,
square, cut-glass stoppered decanters, and with the same indifferent
Virginian tobacco at the same level in the same jars.

I was in the mood for this stability, for the excellent household
article that was their view of life and literature. I wanted to see it