and the bareness of his domestic life.  He will reside in one locality for years without so much as seeking to know his next-door neighbour.  He will live on cordial terms with his comrade in the office, but will never dream of inviting him to his home.  His instinct of privacy is so abnormal that it becomes mere churlishness.  His wife, if he have one, usually fosters this spirit for reasons of her own.  Her interests end with the clothing and education of her children.  She does not wish for friends, does not cultivate the grace of hospitality, and is indifferent to social intercourse.  In short, the barbaric legend that an Englishman’s house is his castle, is nowhere so much respected as in London.

The exhausting character of life in London, and the mere vastness of its geographical area, do something to produce this result.  Men who leave home early in the morning, sit for many hours in an office, and reach home late at night, soon lose both the instinct and desire for social intercourse.  They prefer the comfortable torpor of the fireside.  If some imperative need of new interests torments them, they seek relaxation in the music-hall or some other place of popular resort.  The art of conversation is almost extinct in a certain type of Londoner.  He knows nothing to converse about outside his business interests, his family concerns, and perhaps the latest sensation of the daily newspaper.  Those lighter flights of fancy, those delicate innuendoes and allusions of implied experience or culture—­all the give-and-take of happily contending minds—­all, indeed, that makes true conversation—­is a science utterly unknown to him.  A certain superficial nimbleness of mind he does sometimes possess, but for all that he is a dull creature, made dull by the limitations of his life.

If it should happen, as it often may, that such a man has some genuine instinct for friendship, and has a friend to whom he can confide his real thoughts, the chances are that his friend will be separated from him by the mere vastness of London.  To the rural mind the metropolis appears an entity; in reality it is an empire.  A journey from the extreme north to the extreme south, from Muswell Hill to Dulwich, is less easily accomplished, and often less speedily, than a journey from London to Birmingham.  There is none of that pleasant ‘dropping-in’ for an evening which is possible in country towns of not immoderate radius.  Time-tables have to be consulted, engagement-books scanned, serious preparations made, with the poor result, perhaps, of two hours’ hurried intercourse.  The heartiest friendship does not long survive this malignity of circumstance.  It is something to know that you have a friend, obscurely hidden in some corner of the metropolis; but you see him so rarely, that when you meet, it is like forming a new friendship rather than pursuing an old one.  It is little wonder that, under such conditions, visits grow more and more infrequent, and at last cease.  A message at Christmas, an intimation of a birth, a funeral card, are the solitary relics and mementoes of many a city friendship not extinct, but utterly suspended.