here. It was ugliness that was strangling the soul of the
people; stealing from them all dignity, all self-respect, all honour for
one another; robbing them of hope, of reverence, of joy in life.

Beauty. That was the key to the riddle. All Nature: its golden sunsets
and its silvery dawns; the glory of piled-up clouds, the mystery of
moonlit glades; its rivers winding through the meadows; the calling of
its restless seas; the tender witchery of Spring; the blazonry of autumn
woods; its purple moors and the wonder of its silent mountains; its
cobwebs glittering with a thousand jewels; the pageantry of starry
nights. Form, colour, music! The feathered choristers of bush and brake
raising their matin and their evensong, the whispering of the leaves, the
singing of the waters, the voices of the winds. Beauty and grace in
every living thing, but man. The leaping of the hares, the grouping of
cattle, the flight of swallows, the dainty loveliness of insects' wings,
the glossy skin of horses rising and falling to the play of mighty
muscles. Was it not seeking to make plain to us that God's language was
beauty. Man must learn beauty that he may understand God.

She saw the London of the future. Not the vision popular just then: a
soaring whirl of machinery in motion, of moving pavements and flying
omnibuses; of screaming gramophones and standardized "homes": a city
where Electricity was King and man its soulless slave. But a city of
peace, of restful spaces, of leisured men and women; a city of fine
streets and pleasant houses, where each could live his own life, learning
freedom, individuality; a city of noble schools; of workshops that should
be worthy of labour, filled with light and air; smoke and filth driven
from the land: science, no longer bound to commercialism, having
discovered cleaner forces; a city of gay playgrounds where children
should learn laughter; of leafy walks where the creatures of the wood and
field should be as welcome guests helping to teach sympathy and
kindliness: a city of music, of colour, of gladness. Beauty worshipped
as religion; ugliness banished as a sin: no ugly slums, no ugly cruelty,
no slatternly women and brutalized men, no ugly, sobbing children; no
ugly vice flaunting in every highway its insult to humanity: a city clad
in beauty as with a living garment where God should walk with man.

She had reached a neighbourhood of narrow, crowded streets. The women
were mostly withou