eve’s london moods began to be more complex, and tinged with discontent.

the homelessness of the great city depressed her. she felt its chaotic vastness, knowing all the while that there was ordered purpose behind all its seeming chaos, and that all its clamour and hurry and crowded interplay of energies had meaning and significance. there were some few men who ruled, and who perhaps understood, but the crowd! she knew herself to be one of the crowd driven forward by necessity that barked like a brisk sheepdog round and about a drove of sheep. sometimes her mood was one of passionate resentment. london was so abominably ugly, and the eternal and seemingly senseless hurry tired her brain and her eyes. she had no cockney instincts, and the characteristic smells of the great city aroused no feeling of affectionate satisfaction. the odours connected with burnt oil and petrol, pickle and jam factories, the laying of asphalt, breweries, covent garden, the meat market, had no familiar suggestiveness. nor did the shops interest her for the moment. she had left the more feminine part of herself at fernhill, and was content to wear black.

london gave her to the full the “damned anonymous” feeling, making her realise that she had no corner of her very own. the best of us have some measure of sensitive egoism, an individuality that longs to leave its personal impress upon something, even on the sand by the seashore, and london is nothing but a great, trampled cattle-pen, where thousands of hoofs leave nothing but a churn of mud. people build pigeon houses in their back yards, or train nasturtiums up strings, when they live down by stepney. farther westwards it is the sensitive individualism that makes many a londoner country mad. the self-conscious self resents the sameness, the crowding mediocrity, the thousands of little tables that carry the same food for thousands of people, the thousands of seats in indistinguishable buses and cars, the thousands of little people who rush on the same little errands along the pavements. for there is a bitter uniformity even in the midst of a luxurious variety, when the purse limits the outlook, and a week at southend-on-sea may be the wildest of life’s adventures.

eve began to have the country hunger very badly. autumn had gone, and the winter rains and fogs had set in, and her thoughts went back to fernhill as she remembered it in summer, and as she imagined it in autumn. what a green and spacious world she had left. the hush of the pine woods on a windless day, when nothing moved save an occasional squirrel. the blaze of roses in june. the blue horizons, the great white clouds sailing, the purple heathland, the lush valleys with their glimmerings of water! what autumn pictures rose before her, tantalising her sense of beauty. she saw the bracken turning bronze and gold, the larch woods changing to amber, the maples and beeches flaming pyres of saffron, scarlet and gold. those soft october mornings with the grass grey with dew, and the sunlight struggling with white mists. she began to thirst for beauty, and it was a thirst that picture galleries could not satisfy.

even that last letter of hers to canterton toned with her feeling of cramped finality. she had written “no,” but often her heart cried “yes,” with an impetuous yearning towards sympathy and understanding. what a masterful and creative figure was his when she compared him with these thousands of black-coated men who scuttled hither and thither on business that was someone else’s. she felt that she could be content with more spiritual things, with a subtle perfume of life that made this city existence seem gross and material and petty.

her daily walks from highbury to miss champion’s helped to accentuate the tendencies of these moods of hers. sometimes kate duveen would walk a great part of the way back with her, and eve, who was the more impressionable of the two, led her friend into many suggestive discussions. upper street, islington, saddened her. it seemed so typical of the social scheme from which she was trying to escape.

“doesn’t all this make you feel that it is a city of slaves?”

“that depends, perhaps, on one’s digestion.”

“but does it? these people are slaves, without knowing it. things are thrust on them, and they think they choose.”

“nothing but suggestion, after all.”

“look, i will show you.”

eve stopped in front of a picture shop.

“what’s your opinion of all that is in there?”

“hopeless, sentimental tosh, of course. but it suits the people.”

“it is what is given them, and they take it. there is not one thing in that window that has any glimmer of genius, or even of distinction.”

“what do you expect in islington?”

“i call it catering for slaves, and that worst sort of slavery that does not realise its own condition.”

they walked on and passed a bookshop. eve turned back.

“look again!”

kate duveen laughed.

“i suppose, for instance, that annoys you?”

she pointed to a row of a dozen copies of a very popular novel written by a woman, and called “the renunciation.”

“it does annoy me.”

“that toshy people rave over tosh! a friend of mine knows the authoress. she is a dowdy little bourgeoise who lives in a country town, and they tell me that book has made her ten thousand pounds. she thinks she has a mission, and that she is a second george eliot.”

“doesn’t it annoy you?”

“why should it? fools’ money for a fool’s tale. what do you expect? i suppose donkeys think that there is nothing on earth like a donkey’s braying!”

“all the same, it helps my argument, that these people are slaves, only capable of swallowing just what is given them.”

“i dare say you are right. we ought to change a lot of this in the next fifty years!”

“i wonder. you see, he taught me a good deal, in the country, about growth and evolution, and all that has come from the work of mendel, de vries and bates. he doesn’t believe in london. he called it an orchid house, and said he preferred a few wholesome and indigenous weeds.”

“all the more reason for believing that this sort of london won’t last. we shall get something better.”

“we may do, if we can get rid of some of the politicians.”

it was about this time that eve began to realise the limitations of her present life, and to look towards a very problematical future. it seemed more than probable that “means to the end” would absorb all her energies, and that the end itself would never arrive. she found that her hack work was growing more and more supreme, and that she had no leisure for her own art. she felt tired at night, and on saturdays she was more tempted to go to a theatre than to sit at home in bosnia road and try to produce pictures. sundays, too, became sterile. she stayed in bed till ten, and when she had had breakfast she found the suburban atmosphere weighing upon her spirits. church bells rang; decorous people in sunday clothes passed her window on their way to church or chapel. if she went for a walk she everywhere met a suggestion of respectable relaxation that dominated her energies and sent her home depressed and cynical. as for the afternoons, they were spoilt for her by mr. albert buss’s banjo, though how his genteel mother reconciled herself to banjo-playing on a sunday eve could not imagine. three or four friends joined him. eve saw them saunter in at the gate, with dandy canes, soft hats, and an air of raw doggishness. they usually stared hard at her window. the walls and floors were thin, and eve could hear much that they said, especially when mrs. buss went out for her afternoon walk, and left the “nuts” together. they talked about horse-racing and girls.

“she’s a little bit of all right!”

“you bet!”

“ain’t afraid to go home in the dark!”

“what sort of young lady’s the lodger, bert? anything on?”

“not my style. ain’t taking any!”

“go on, you don’t know how to play up to a girl. i’d get round anything in london.”

just about dusk mr. buss and his friends sauntered out on love adventures, and mrs. buss sat down at her piano and sung hymns with a sort of rolling, throaty gusto. eve found it almost unendurable, so much so that she abandoned the idea of trying to use her sundays at bosnia road, and asked kate duveen to let her spend the day with her in bloomsbury.

on weekdays, when it happened to be fine and not too cold, she and kate would spend the twenty minutes after lunch in st. james’s park, sitting on a seat and watching the irrepressible sparrows or the machinations of a predatory cat. the bare trees stood out against the misty blue of the london horizon, and even when the sun shone, the sunlight seemed very thin and feeble. other people sat on the seats, and read, or ate food out of paper bags. very rarely were these people conversational. they appeared to have many thoughts to brood over, and nothing to say.

kate duveen had noticed a change in eve. there was a different look in her eyes. she, too, was less talkative, and sometimes a cynical note came into her voice.

“what are you thinking about?”

“was i thinking?”

“you haven’t said anything for five minutes.”

“one can be conscious of an inner atmosphere, without calling it thought.”

“much fog about?”

some of the sensitive fire came back into eve’s eyes.

“kate, i am horribly afraid of being crushed—of becoming one of the crowd. it seems to me that one may never have time to be oneself.”

“you mean that the effort to live leaves no margin?”

“that’s it. i suppose most of us find in the end that we are the slaves of our hack work, and that our ambitions die of slow starvation. think of it. think of the thousands of people who had something to do or say, and were smothered by getting a living.”

“it’s the usual thing. i felt it myself. i nearly gave up; but i set my teeth and scratched. i’ve determined to fight through—to refuse to be smothered. i’ll get my independence, somehow.”

“sometimes i feel that i must throw up all this bread and butter stuff, and stake everything on one adventure.”

“then don’t do it. i have seen people try it. ninety-nine out of the hundred come back broken, far worse off than they were before. they’re humble, docile things for the rest of their lives. carry the harness without a murmur. not a kick left, i know.”

“i have been thinking of a secretaryship. it might give me more leisure—breathing space——”

“try it!”

“are you being ironical?”

“not a bit. i’ll speak to miss champion. she’s not a bad sort, so long as you are tweety-tweety and never cause any complications.”

“i wish you would speak to her.”

“i will.”

kate duveen had peculiar influence with miss champion, perhaps because she was not afraid of her. miss champion thought her a very sound and reliable young woman, a young woman whose health and strength seemed phenomenal, and who never caused any friction by going down with influenza, and so falling into arrears with her work. kate duveen had made herself a very passable linguist. she could draw, type, scribble shorthand, do book-keeping, write a good magazine article or edit the ladies’ page of a paper. every year she spent her three weeks’ holiday abroad, and had seen a good deal of germany, italy and france. miss champion always said that kate duveen had succeeded in doing a very difficult thing—combining versatility with efficiency.

“so miss carfax would like a secretaryship? i suppose you think her suitable?”

“there is not a safer girl in london.”

“i understand you. because she has looks.”

“i think you can ignore them. she is very keen to get on.”

“very well. i will look out for something to suit her.”

“i’m much obliged to you, miss champion. i believe in eve carfax.”