He observed it and its
inhabitants with a certain new curiosity. A notable
alteration for the better had come over his spirits.
It might be the champagne at luncheon, or it might
be the mere operation of a frank talk with Semple,
that had dissipated his gloom. At all events it was
gone--and he strolled along in quite placid contentment,
taking in the panorama of London's more intimate life with
the interest of a Londoner who has obtained a fresh country eye.
He who had seen most of the world, and not cared much
about the spectacle, found himself now consciously enjoying
observation as he had not supposed it possible to do.
He surrendered himself to the experience with a novel
sense of having found something worth while--and
found it, moreover, under his very nose. In some dull,
meaningless fashion he had always known this part
of London, and been familiar with its external aspects.
Now suddenly he perceived that the power had come to him
of seeing it all in a different way. The objects he beheld,
inanimate and otherwise, had specific new meanings for him.
His mind was stirred pleasurably by the things they said
to him.
He looked at all the contents of the windows as he passed;
at the barrows of the costers and hawkers crowding up
the side-streets; at the coarse-haired, bare-headed
girls and women standing about in their shawls and big
white aprons; at the weakling babies in their arms or
about the thick, clumsy folds of their stained skirts;
at the grimy, shuffling figures of their men-folk, against
the accustomed background of the public-house corner,
with its half-open door, and its fly-blown theatre-bills
in the windows; at the drivers of the vans and carts,
sleepily overlooking the huge horses, gigantic to the
near view as some survival from the age of mammoths,
which pushed gingerly, ploddingly, their tufted feet over
the greasy stones; at foul interiors where through the
blackness one discerned bent old hags picking over refuse;
at the faces which, as he passed, made some special human
appeal to him--faces blurred with drink, faces pallid
with under-feeding, faces worn into masks by the tension
of trouble, faces sweetened by resignation, faces aglow
with devil-may-care glee.
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