There is no jerk, no sound, no hint of material shock. We are in London, and clothed in the fashion of the town. The sullen¹ roar of London fills our ears. . . .

I see that I am standing² beside an iron seat of poor design in that grey and gawky waste of asphalte — Trafalgar Square, and the botanist³, with perplexity in his face, stares from me to a poor, shrivelled, dirt-lined old woman — my God! what a neglected thing she is! — who proffers⁴ a box of matches. . . .

He buys almost mechanically, and turns back to me.

“I was saying,” he says, “the past rules us absolutely. These dreams ——”

His sentence does not complete itself. He looks nervous and irritated.

“You have a trick at times,” he says instead, “of making your suggestions so vivid ——”

He takes a plunge⁵. “If you don’t mind,” he says in a sort of quavering ultimatum⁶, “we won’t discuss that aspect of the question — the lady, I mean — further.”

He pauses, and there still hangs a faint perplexity between us.

“But ——” I begin.

For a moment we stand there, and my dream of Utopia runs off me like water from an oiled slab⁷. Of course — we lunched at our club. We came back from Switzerland by no dream train but by the ordinary Bale express. We have been talking of that Lucerne woman he harps⁸ upon, and I have made some novel comment on his story. I have touched certain possibilities.

“You can’t conceivably understand,” he says.

“The fact remains,” he goes on, taking up the thread of his argument again with an air of having defined our field, “we are the scars of the past. That’s a thing one can discuss — without

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