After three days or so, he begins, half-unconsciously, slipping over every now and then into what seems to be a vague, loose first person plural.

Then the first person plural grows.

He finds at last that his thinking has settled down into a kind of happy, easy-going, international, editorial “We.”  New York and London, Chicago and Sheffield, go drifting together through his thoughts, and even Paris, glimmering faintly over there, and a dim round world, and he asks, as the people of a world stream by, “Where are WE going?”

Thus it is that London, looming, teeming, world-suggesting, gets its grip upon a man, a fresh American, and stretches him, stretches him before his own eyes, makes him cosmopolitan, does his thinking for him.

* * * * *

There was a great sea to still his soul and lay down upon his spirit that big, quiet roundness of the earth.

Nothing is quite the same after that wide strip of sea—­sleeping out there alone night by night—­the gentle round earth sloping away down from under one on both sides, in the midst of space....  Then, suddenly, almost before one knows, that quiet Space still lingering round one, perhaps one finds oneself thrust up out of the ground in the night into that big yellow roar of Trafalgar Square.

And here are the swift sudden crowds of people, one’s own fellow-men hurrying past.  One looks into the faces of the people hurrying past:  “Where are we going?” One looks at the stars:  “WHERE ARE WE GOING?”

* * * * *

That night, when I was thrust up out of the ground and stood dazed in the Square, I was told in a minute that this London where I was was a besieged and conquered city.  Some men had risen up in a day and said to London:  “No one shall go in.  No one shall go out.”

I was in the great proud city at last, the capital of the world, her big, new, self-assured inventions all about her, all around her, and soldiers camping out with her locomotives!

With her long trains for endless belts of people going in and coming out, with her air-brakes, electric lights, and motor-cars and aerial mails, it seemed passing strange to be told that her great stations were all choked up with a queer, funny, old, gone-by, clanky piece of machinery, an invention for making people good, like soldiers!

And I stood in the middle of the roar of Trafalgar Square and asked, as all England was asking that night:  “Where are we going?”

And I looked in the faces of the people hurrying past.

And nobody knew.

And the next day I went through the silenter streets of the city, the great crowded dailies where all the world troops through, and then the more quiet weeklies, then the monthlies, more dignified and like private parks; and the quarterlies, too, thoughtful, high-minded, a little absent, now and then a footfall passing through.