They were walking up Church Street, Kensington, that dismal communication trench which links the support line of Kensington High Street with the front line of Notting Hill Gate. How curious are cities, with their intricate trench systems and perpetual warfare, concealed but as deadly as the open warfare of armies! We live in trenches, with flat revetments of house-fronts as parapet and parados. The warfare goes on behind the house-fronts—wives with husbands, children with parents, employers with employed, tradesmen with tradesmen, banker with lawyer, and the triumphal doctor rooting out life’s casualties. Desperate warfare—for what? Money as the symbol of power; power as the symbol or affirmation of existence. Throbbing warfare of men’s cities! As fierce and implacable and concealed as the desperate warfare of plants and the hidden carnage of animals. We walk up Church Street. Up the communication trench. We cannot see “over the top,” have no vista of the immense No-Man’s Land of London’s roofs. We cannot pierce through the house-fronts. What is going on behind those dingy unpierceable house-fronts? What tortures, what contests, what incests, what cruelties, what sacrifice, what horror, what sordid emptiness? We cannot pierce through the pavement and Belgian blocks, see the subterranean veins of electric cables, the arteries of gas and water mains, the viscera of underground railways. We cannot feel the water filtering through London clay, do not perceive the relics of ruined Londons waiting for archæologists from the antipodes, do not see, far, far down, the fossillised bones of extinct animals and their coprolites. Here in Notting Hill, the sabre-toothed tiger roared and savagely devoured its victims, the huge-horned deer darted in terror; wolves howled; the brown bear preyed; overhead by day screamed eagles and by night flitted huge bats. Mysterious forest murmurs, abrupt yells and threatening growls, and the amorous hatred of female beasts, were vocal when the Channel was the Rhine’s estuary. “Time passes,” said George. “What do we know of Time? Prehistoric beasts, like the ichthyosaurus and Queen Victoria, have laired and copulated and brought forth....” A motor-bus roared by, like a fabulous noisy red ox with fiery eyes and a luminous interior, quenching his words. “Eh?” said Mr. Upjohn. “*****!” “Now, look at these simian bipeds,” George pursued, pointing to an inoffensive pair of lovers and a suspicious cop, “more foul, more deadly, more incestuously blood-lustful....” “You see, what I mean is, nothing matters to these people but our conversation.... Now, what I mean is, you get fat Shobbe to let you write an article on me and Suprematism.”