the road.  Here and there one could see brown panelling inside the hall door....  The march that the mind keeps beneath the windows of others is queer enough.  Now distracted by brown panelling; now by a fern in a pot; here improvising a few phrases to dance with the barrel-organ; again snatching a detached gaiety from a drunken man; then altogether absorbed by words the poor shout across the street at each other (so outright, so lusty)—­yet all the while having for centre, for magnet, a young man alone in his room.

“Life is wicked—­life is detestable,” cried Rose Shaw.

The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it.  The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted.  What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?

“Holborn straight ahead of you” says the policeman.  Ah, but where are you going if instead of brushing past the old man with the white beard, the silver medal, and the cheap violin, you let him go on with his story, which ends in an invitation to step somewhere, to his room, presumably, off Queen’s Square, and there he shows you a collection of birds’ eggs and a letter from the Prince of Wales’s secretary, and this (skipping the intermediate stages) brings you one winter’s day to the Essex coast, where the little boat makes off to the ship, and the ship sails and you behold on the skyline the Azores; and the flamingoes rise; and there you sit on the verge of the marsh drinking rum-punch, an outcast from civilization, for you have committed a crime, are infected with yellow fever as likely as not, and—­fill in the sketch as you like.  As frequent as street corners in Holborn are these chasms in the continuity of our ways.  Yet we keep straight on.

Rose Shaw, talking in rather an emotional manner to Mr. Bowley at Mrs. Durrant’s evening party a few nights back, said that life was wicked because a man called Jimmy refused to marry a woman called (if memory serves) Helen Aitken.

Both were beautiful.  Both were inanimate.  The oval tea-table invariably separated them, and the plate of biscuits was all he ever gave her.  He bowed; she inclined her head.  They danced.  He danced divinely.  They sat in the alcove; never a word was said.  Her pillow was wet with tears.  Kind Mr. Bowley and dear Rose Shaw marvelled and deplored.  Bowley had rooms in the Albany.  Rose was re-born every evening precisely as the clock struck eight.  All four were civilization’s triumphs, and if you persist that a command of the English language is part of our inheritance, one can only reply that beauty is almost always dumb.  Male beauty in association with female beauty breeds in the onlooker a sense of fear.  Often have I seen them—­Helen and Jimmy—­and likened them to ships adrift, and feared for my own little craft.  Or again, have you ever watched fine collie dogs couchant at twenty yards’ distance?  As she passed him his cup there was that quiver in her flanks.  Bowley saw what was up-asked Jimmy to breakfast.  Helen must have confided in Rose.  For my own part, I find it exceedingly difficult to interpret songs without words.  And now Jimmy feeds crows in Flanders and Helen visits hospitals.  Oh, life is damnable, life is wicked, as Rose Shaw said.