spite of everything, we still care for; but where can we find them in
the dingy London streets and suburbs?'

'And yet,' our eyes seemed to ask each other, 'isn't this garden, in its
shabby, pretentious way, romantic; isn't it like something in a poem of
Verlaine's; hasn't it now, in the dim light, a kind of beauty? And this
mood of meditation after our excellent tea, what name, if we are honest,
can we call it by, if we do not call it Happiness?'

MISAPPREHENSION

People often seem to take me for some one else; they talk to me as if I
were a person of earnest views and unalterable convictions. 'What is
your opinion of Democracy?' they ask: 'Are you in favour of the Channel
Tunnel?' 'Do you believe in existence after Death?'

I assume a thoughtful attitude, and by means of grave looks and evasive
answers, I conceal--or at least I hope I conceal--my discreditable
secret.

THE LIFT

What on earth had I come up for? I stood out of breath in my bedroom,
having completely forgotten the errand which had carried me upstairs,
leaping two steps at a time.

Gloves! Of course it was my gloves which I had left there. But what did
gloves matter, I asked myself, in a world, as Dr. Johnson describes it,
bursting with misery?

O stars and garters! how bored I am by this trite, moralising way of
regarding natural phenomena--this crying of vanity on the beautiful
manifestations of mechanical forces. This desire of mine to appear out
of doors in appropriate apparel, if it can thus defy and overcome the
law of gravitation, if it can lift twelve stone of matter thirty or
forty feet above the earth's surface; if it can do this every day, and
several times a day, and never get out of order, is it not as remarkable
and convenient in the house as a hydraulic lift?

SLOANE STREET

When I walk out, middle-aged, but still sprightly, and still, if the
truth must be told, with an idiot dream in my heart of some romantic
encounter, I look at the passers-by, say in Sloane Street, and then I
begin to imagine moonfaces more alluring than any I see in that
thoroughfare. But then again vaster thoughts visit me, remote
metaphysical musings; those faces like moons I imagined all wane as
moons wane, the passers-by vanish; and immortal Reason, disdaining the
daymoth she dwells with, turns away to her crystalline sphere of sublime
contemplation. I am lost out of time, I walk on alone in a world of
white silence.

RE