He went into those little gardens beneath the over-hanging, brightly-lit masses of the Savoy Hotel and the Hotel Cecil.  He sat down on a seat and became aware of the talk of the two people next to him.  It was the talk of a young couple evidently on the eve of marriage.  The man was congratulating himself on having regular employment at last; ’they like me,’ he said, ’and I like the job.  If I work up—­in’r dozen years or so I ought to be gettin’ somethin’ pretty comfortable.  That’s the plain sense of it, Hetty.  There ain’t no reason whatsoever why we shouldn’t get along very decently—­very decently indeed.’

The desire for little successes amidst conditions securely fixed!  So it struck upon Holsten’s mind.  He added in his diary, ’I had a sense of all this globe as that....’

By that phrase he meant a kind of clairvoyant vision of this populated world as a whole, of all its cities and towns and villages, its high roads and the inns beside them, its gardens and farms and upland pastures, its boatmen and sailors, its ships coming along the great circles of the ocean, its time-tables and appointments and payments and dues as it were one unified and progressive spectacle.  Sometimes such visions came to him; his mind, accustomed to great generalisations and yet acutely sensitive to detail, saw things far more comprehensively than the minds of most of his contemporaries.  Usually the teeming sphere moved on to its predestined ends and circled with a stately swiftness on its path about the sun.  Usually it was all a living progress that altered under his regard.  But now fatigue a little deadened him to that incessancy of life, it seemed now just an eternal circling.  He lapsed to the commoner persuasion of the great fixities and recurrencies of the human routine.  The remoter past of wandering savagery, the inevitable changes of to-morrow were veiled, and he saw only day and night, seed-time and harvest, loving and begetting, births and deaths, walks in the summer sunlight and tales by the winter fireside, the ancient sequence of hope and acts and age perennially renewed, eddying on for ever and ever, save that now the impious hand of research was raised to overthrow this drowsy, gently humming, habitual, sunlit spinning-top of man’s existence....

For a time he forgot wars and crimes and hates and persecutions, famine and pestilence, the cruelties of beasts, weariness and the bitter wind, failure and insufficiency and retrocession.  He saw all mankind in terms of the humble Sunday couple upon the seat beside him, who schemed their inglorious outlook and improbable contentments.  ’I had a sense of all this globe as that.’