d and embalmed in books. The poets, painters,
talkers who lived up there were at each other all the time in their
great game of make-believe. How could it be otherwise, when there was
veritably blossom on the trees and the chimneys were ceasing to smoke?
How otherwise, when the sun actually shone on the ponds? But the four
young people (for Alan joined in--hypnotized by Sheila) did not stay in
Hampstead. Chiefly on top of tram and 'bus they roamed the wilderness.
Bethnal Green and Leytonstone, Kensington and Lambeth, St. James's and
Soho, Whitechapel, Shoreditch, West Ham, and Piccadilly, they traversed
the whole ant-heap at its most ebullient moment. They knew their Whitman
and their Dostoievsky sufficiently to be aware that they ought to love
and delight in everything--in the gentleman walking down Piccadilly with
a flower in his buttonhole, and in the lady sewing that buttonhole in
Bethnal Green; in the orator bawling himself hoarse close to the Marble
Arch, the coster loading his barrow in Covent Garden; and in Uncle John
Freeland rejecting petitions in Whitehall. All these things, of course,
together with the long lines of little gray houses in Camden Town, long
lines of carts with bobtail horses rattling over Blackfriars' Bridge,
long smells drifting behind taxicabs--all these things were as
delightful and as stimulating to the soul as the clouds that trailed the
heavens, the fronds of the lilac, and Leonardo's Cartoon in the Diploma
Gallery. All were equal manifestations of that energy in flower known
as 'Life.' They knew that everything they saw and felt and smelled OUGHT
equally to make them long to catch creatures to their hearts and cry:
Hosanna! And Nedda and Alan, bred in Hampstead, even knew that to
admit that these things did not all move them in the same way would be
regarded as a sign of anaemia. Nevertheless--most queerly--these four
young people confessed to each other all sorts of sensations besides
that 'Hosanna' one. They even confessed to rage and pity and disgust one
moment, and to joy and dreams the next, and they differed greatly as to
what excited which. It was truly odd! The only thing on which they did
seem to agree was that they were having 'a thundering good time.' A sort
of sense of "Blow everything!" was in their wings, and this was due
not to the fact that they were thinking of and loving and admiring the
little gray streets and the gentleman in Piccadilly--as, no doubt, in
accordance wit