again, to hear again how it was filling the unvarying, allotted columns
of the daily, the weekly, or the monthly journals. I wanted to breathe
again this mild atmosphere where there are no longer hopes or fears.
But, alas!...

I rang bell after bell of that gloomy central London district. You know
what happens. One pulls the knob under the name of the person one
seeks--pulls it three, or, it may be, four times in vain. One rings the
housekeeper's bell; it reverberates, growing fainter and fainter,
gradually stifled by a cavernous subterranean atmosphere. After an age a
head peeps round the opening door, the head of a hopeless anachronism,
the head of a widow of early Victorian merit, or of an orphan of
incredible age. One asks for So-and-so--he's out; for Williams--he's
expecting an increase of family, and has gone into the country with
madame. And Waring? Oh, he's gone no one knows where, and Johnson who
used to live at Number 44 only comes up to town on Tuesdays now. I
exhausted the possibilities of that part of Bloomsbury, the
possibilities of variety in the types of housekeepers. The rest of
London divided itself into bands--into zones. Between here and
Kensington the people that I knew could not be called on after dinner,
those who lived at Chiswick and beyond were hyperborean--one was bound
by the exigencies of time. It was ten o'clock as I stood reflecting on a
doorstep--on Johnson's doorstep. I must see somebody, must talk to
somebody, before I went to bed in the cheerless room at the club. It was
true I might find a political stalwart in the smoking-room--but that was
a last resort, a desperate and ignominious _pis aller_.

There was Fox, I should find him at the office. But it needed a change
of tone before I could contemplate with equanimity the meeting of that
individual. I had been preparing myself to confront all the ethically