“Like a love-sick boy—­like a damn love-sick boy,” I growled at myself.  My sense of humour was returning to me.  There began a pilgrimage in search of companionship.

London was a desert more solitary than was believable.  On those brilliant summer evenings the streets were crowded, were alive, bustled with the chitter-chatter of footsteps, with the chitter-chatter of voices, of laughter.

It was impossible to walk, impossible to do more than tread on one’s own toes; one was almost blinded by the constant passing of faces.  It was like being in a wheat-field with one’s eyes on a level with the indistinguishable ears.  One was alone in one’s intense contempt for all these faces, all these contented faces; one towered intellectually above them; one towered into regions of rarefaction.  And down below they enjoyed themselves.  One understood life better; they better how to live.  That struck me then—­in Oxford Street.  There was the intense good-humour, the absolute disregard of the minor inconveniences, of the inconveniences of a crowd, of the ignominy of being one of a crowd.  There was the intense poetry of the soft light, the poetry of the summer-night coolness, and they understood how to enjoy it.  I turned up an ancient court near Bedford Row.

“In the name of God,” I said, “I will enjoy ...” and I did.  The poetry of those old deserted quarters came suddenly home to me—­all the little commonplace thoughts; all the commonplace associations of Georgian London.  For the time I was done with the meanings of things.

I was seeking Lea—­he was not at home.  The quarter was honeycombed with the homes of people one knows; of people one used to know, excellent young men who wrote for the papers, who sub-edited papers, who designed posters, who were always just the same.  One forgot them for a year or two, one came across them again and found them just the same—­still writing for the same papers, still sub-editing the same papers, designing the same posters.  I was in the mood to rediscover them in the privacies of their hearths, with the same excellent wives making fair copies of the same manuscripts, with the same gaiety of the same indifferent whiskey, brown or pale or suspicious-looking, in heavy, square, cut-glass stoppered decanters, and with the same indifferent Virginian tobacco at the same level in the same jars.

I was in the mood for this stability, for the excellent household article that was their view of life and literature.  I wanted to see it again, to hear again how it was filling the unvarying, allotted columns of the daily, the weekly, or the monthly journals.  I wanted to breathe again this mild atmosphere where there are no longer hopes or fears.  But, alas!...