enormous whim. The
Marble Arch itself, in its new insular position, with traffic turning
dizzily all about it, struck me as a placid monstrosity. What could be
wilder than to have a huge arched gateway, with people going everywhere
except under it? If I took down my front door and stood it up all by
itself in the middle of my back garden, my village neighbours (in their
simplicity) would probably stare. Yet the Marble Arch is now precisely
that; an elaborate entrance and the only place by which no one can
enter. By the new arrangement its last weak pretence to be a gate has
been taken away. The cabman still cannot drive through it, but he can
have the delights of riding round it, and even (on foggy nights) the
rapture of running into it. It has been raised from the rank of a
fiction to the dignity of an obstacle.

As I began to walk across a corner of the Park, this sense of what is
strange in cities began to mingle with some sense of what is stern as
well as strange. It was one of those queer-coloured winter days when a
watery sky changes to pink and grey and green, like an enormous opal.
The trees stood up grey and angular, as if in attitudes of agony; and
here and there on benches under the trees sat men as grey and angular
as they. It was cold even for me, who had eaten a large breakfast and
purposed to eat a perfectly Gargantuan lunch; it was colder for the men
under the trees. And to eastward through the opalescent haze, the warmer
whites and yellows of the houses in Park-lane shone as unsubstantially
as if the clouds themselves had taken on the shape of mansions to mock
the men who sat there in the cold. But the mansions were real--like the
mockery.

No one worth calling a man allows his moods to change his convictions;
but it is by moods that we understand other men's convictions. The bigot
is not he who knows he is right; every sane man knows he is right. The
bigot is he whose emotions and imagination are too cold and weak to feel
how it is that other men go wrong. At that moment I felt vividly how men
might go wrong, even unto dynamite. If one of those huddled men under
the trees had stood up and asked for rivers of blood, it would have been
erroneous--but not irrelevant. It would have been appropriate and in the
picture; that lurid grey picture of insolence on one side and impotence
on the other. It may be true (on the whole it is) that this social
machine we have made is better than anarchy. Still, it is a