I don't remember ever talking
to anybody about my mother. That isn't to say for a single instant,
however, that I didn't esteem her. We simply were not designed to fit
into the same scheme. We were of different generations. We were of
cross-grained stuff, if I may say so, dour and tough and ill to match
with common deal, and our roots were sunk in the restless, estranging
sea.

"And so once more I came to London, a wanderer, noting what had been
built and what pulled down. London! Never for a single day will they let
it alone. It is like some vast cellular organism asprawl on the Thames
mud, forever heaving and sweating and rotting and growing. A fungus, a
sponge, sucking in the produce of continents, sending out the wealth of
empires. I used to stand on London Bridge and watch the steamers loading
and discharging from the grimy overhanging warehouses. A busman's
holiday, you say. But there didn't seem anything else to do while I was
waiting for a ship. I found my old British Museum Reading Room pass
among my papers at home and I used it one day to look in upon my bygone
haunts. It gave me a shock to see some of the same old grey-haired men
and women reading out of the same silly old tomes. Yes! I was almost
ready to swear one old girl was at the same page as I left her years
before. And the suggestions in the manuscript complaint book! Good Lord!
I glanced at it as I wandered round, for it had often amused me in the
past to see the weird and wonderful volumes the authorities were asked
to procure. And here I found some crazy soul had demanded the first
volume of the Chinese Zetetic Society's proceedings. Another complained
of a lack of text-books treating of secret societies in the Tenth
Century. And the world was going round outside all the time! I looked at
them, these men and women--their shoulders humped as they scratched with
their absurd quill-pens, their faces pallid with the light reflected
from the pages. Some few, as though to show what a farce the whole
business could be, had got out a perfect library of books, bastions of
them, and lay back in their chairs, snoring. I couldn't bear it. I had
to get out. The air was stifling me after the open sea, so I left that
subsidized lunatic asylum and took the steamboat up the river to
Hammersmith. It was spring, late spring, and there was a whisper in the
air that meant, if I read it rightly, love and romance and youth. It was
all round me as I walked out to Ealing.