lighted carriage windows gliding southward…

Suddenly I began to realise just what it was we were doing.

And now, indeed, Iknew what London had been to me, London where I

had been born and educated, the slovenly mother of mymind and all

my ambitions, London and the empire! It seemed to me we must be

going out to a world that was utterly empty. All our significance

fell from us-and before us was no meaning any more. We were

leaving London; my hand, which had gripped so hungrily upon its

complex life, had been forced from it, my fingers left their hold.

That was over. I should never have a voice in public affairs again.

The inexorable unwritten law which forbids overt scandal sentenced

me. We were going out to a new life, a life that appeared in that

moment to be a mere shrivelled remnant of me, a mere residuum of

sheltering and feeding andseeing amidst alien scenery and the sound

of unfamiliar tongues. We were going to live cheaply in a foreign

place, so cut off that I meet now the merest stray tourist, the

commonest tweed-clad stranger with a mixture of shyness and hunger…

And suddenly all the schemes I was leaving appeared fine and

adventurous and hopeful as they had never done before. How great

was this purpose I had relinquished, this bold and subtle remaking

of the English will! I haddoubted so many things, and now suddenly

Idoubted my unimportance,doubted my right to this suicidal

abandonment. Was I not a trusted messenger, greatly trusted and

favoured, who had turned aside by the way? Had I not, after all,

stood for far more than I hadthought; was I not filching from that

dear great city of my birth and life, some vitally necessary thing,

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