No one perhaps has ever felt passionately¹ towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely² desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner. As the foxhunter hunts in order to preserve the breed of foxes, and the golfer plays in order that open spaces may be preserved from the builders, so when the desire comes upon us to go street rambling³ the pencil does for a pretext⁴, and getting up we say: “Really I must buy a pencil,” as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter — rambling the streets of London.

The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne⁵ brightness of the air and the sociability⁶ of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted⁷ as in the summer by the longing⁸ for shade and solitude⁹ and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow¹⁰. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous¹¹ trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room. For there we sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own

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