between the shops and the barrows. And soon I became quite familiar with
the devious, vicious, dirtily-pleasant eroticism of Soho. I found those
crowded streets a vast relief from the dull grey exterior of Brompton
where I lodged and lived my daily life. In Soho, indeed, I got my first
inkling of the factor of replacement that is so important in both the
English and the American process.

Even in the West End, in Mayfair and the square, about Pall Mall, Ewart
was presently to remind me the face of the old aristocratic dignity was
fairer than its substance; here were actors and actresses, here money
lenders and Jews, here bold financial adventurers, and I thought of my
uncle's frayed cuff as he pointed out this house in Park Lane and
that. That was so and so's who made a corner in borax, and that palace
belonged to that hero among modern adventurers, Barmentrude, who used
to be an I.D.B.,--an illicit diamond buyer that is to say. A city of
Bladesovers, the capital of a kingdom of Bladesovers, all much shaken
and many altogether in decay, parasitically occupied, insidiously
replaced by alien, unsympathetic and irresponsible elements; and with
a ruling an adventitious and miscellaneous empire of a quarter of this
daedal earth complex laws, intricate social necessities, disturbing
insatiable suggestions, followed from this. Such was the world into
which I had come, into which I had in some way to thrust myself and fit
my problem, my temptations, my efforts, my patriotic instinct, all my
moral instincts, my physical appetites, my dreams and my sanity.

London! I came up to it, young and without advisers, rather
priggish, rather dangerously open-minded and very open-eyed, and with
something--it is, I think, the common gift of imaginative youth, and I
claim it unblushingly--fine in me, finer than the world and seeking fine
responses. I did not want simply to live or simply to live happily or