As he shouldered his way through the throng before the Oxford Street shop windows he appreciated a queer effect, almost as it were of insanity, about all this rich and abundant and ultimately aimless life, this tremendous spawning and proliferation of uneventful humanity. These individual lives signified no doubt enormously to the individuals, but did all the shining, reflecting, changing existence that went by like bubbles in a stream, signify collectively anything more than the leaping, glittering confusion of shoaling mackerel on a sunlit afternoon? The pretty girl looking into the window schemed picturesque achievements with lace and ribbon, the beggar at the curb was alert for any sympathetic eye, the chauffeur on the waiting taxi-cab watched the twopences ticking on with a quiet satisfaction; each followed a keenly sought immediate end, but altogether? Where were they going altogether? Until he knew that, where was the sanity of statecraft, the excuse of any impersonal effort, the significance of anything beyond a life of appetites and self-seeking instincts? He found that perplexing suspicion of priggishness affecting him again. Why couldn't he take the gift of life as it seemed these people took it? Why was he continually lapsing into these sombre, dimly religious questionings and doubts? Why after all should he concern himself with these riddles of some collective and ultimate meaning in things? Was he for all his ability and security so afraid of the accidents of life that on that account he clung to this conception of a larger impersonal issue which the world in general seemed to have abandoned so cheerfully? At any rate he did cling to it--and his sense of it made the abounding active life of this stirring, bristling thoroughfare an almost unendurable perplexity.... By the Marble Arch a little crowd had gathered at the pavement edge. He remarked other little knots towards Paddington, and then still others, and inquiring, found the King was presently to pass. They promised themselves the gratification of seeing the King go by. They would see a carriage, they would see horses and coachmen, perhaps even they might catch sight of a raised hat and a bowing figure. And this would be a gratification to them, it would irradiate the day with a sense of experiences, exceptional and precious. For that some of them had already been standing about for two or three hours.