All around me stretched an immense town—­an immense blackness.  People—­thousands of people hurried past me, had errands, had aims, had others to talk to, to trifle with.  But I had nobody.  This immense city, this immense blackness, had no interiors for me.  There were house fronts, staring windows, closed doors, but nothing within; no rooms, no hollow places.  The houses meant nothing to me, nothing more than the solid earth.  Lea remained the only one the thought of whom was not like the reconsideration of an ancient, a musty pair of gloves.

He lived just anywhere.  Being a publisher’s reader, he had to report upon the probable commercial value of the manuscripts that unknown authors sent to his employer, and I suppose he had a settled plan of life, of the sort that brought him within the radius of a given spot at apparently irregular, but probably ordered, intervals.  It seemed to be no more than a piece of good luck that let me find him that night in a little room in one of the by-ways of Bloomsbury.  He was sprawling angularly on a cane lounge, surrounded by whole rubbish heaps of manuscript, a grey scrawl in a foam of soiled paper.  He peered up at me as I stood in the doorway.

“Hullo!” he said, “what’s brought you here?  Have a manuscript?” He waved an abstracted hand round him.  “You’ll find a chair somewhere.”  A claret bottle stood on the floor beside him.  He took it by the neck and passed it to me.

He bent his head again and continued his reading.  I displaced three bulky folio sheaves of typewritten matter from a chair and seated myself behind him.  He continued to read.

“I hadn’t seen these rooms before,” I said, for want of something to say.

The room was not so much scantily as arbitrarily furnished.  It contained a big mahogany sideboard; a common deal table, an extraordinary kind of folding wash-hand-stand; a deal bookshelf, the cane lounge, and three unrelated chairs.  There were three framed Dutch prints on the marble mantel-shelf; striped curtains before the windows.  A square, cheap looking-glass, with a razor above it, hung between them.  And on the floor, on the chairs, on the sideboard, on the unmade bed, the profusion of manuscripts.

He scribbled something on a blue paper and began to roll a cigarette.  He took off his glasses, rubbed them, and closed his eyes tightly.

“Well, and how’s Sussex?” he asked.

I felt a sudden attack of what, essentially, was nostalgia.  The fact that I was really leaving an old course of life, was actually and finally breaking with it, became vividly apparent.  Lea, you see, stood for what was best in the mode of thought that I was casting aside.  He stood for the aspiration.  The brooding, the moodiness; all the childish qualities, were my own importations.  I was a little ashamed to tell him, that—­that I was going to live, in fact.  Some of the glory of it had gone, as if one of two candles I had been reading by had flickered out.  But I told him, after a fashion, that I had got a job at last.