As he walked--it was a fine spring day with the most beautiful changing lights and a sweet breeze--he congratulated himself on the wisdom of having come to London. Marriage might be difficult--there was no warrant, Scriptural or other, for expecting it to be easy--but at least in London there was interest. There was not the unrelieved sordidness of other English cities. There was a tradition, some attempt to maintain it, graciousness, a kind of dignity--it might be the dignity of a roast sirloin of beef, but dignity it certainly was--here and there traces of manners, and leisure not altogether swamped by luxury. Coming from Thrigsby was like leaving the racket of the factory for the elegant shop in which the finished articles were sold. He liked that simile, and there he left his speculations concerning London. He was not at his ease in this kind of thinking; a thought was only valuable to him when it was successfully married to an emotion to produce an image. For London he could find no image, and when he thought of England he was taken back to his most vivid emotion, that when in the caravan with Copas they had breasted the hill and come in view of the Pennine Range: but this was a mere emotion mated with no thought. As for the Empire, it simply had no significance. It was a misnomer, or rather, a name given to an illusion, or, at best, a generalization. It was certainly not an entity, but only the impossible probability of a universally accepted fiction. He could not accept it, nor could he accept the loose terminology of the politicians. For this reason he could never now read the newspapers except for the cricket and football news in which his interest was maintained by habit. Less and less was he interested in things and ideas that were not immediately human, and therefore fluid and varying in form and color as clouds and trees in the wind and birds in the air--and human beings on the earth. Rigid theory and fixed conceptions actually hurt him; they were detached, dead, like windfall fruit rotting on the ground, and everywhere, in books, in the newspapers, in public speeches, he saw them gathered up and stored, because it was too much trouble to take the ripe fruit from the tree, or to wait for the hanging fruit to ripen, or because (he thought) men walk with their eyes to the ground, even as he had done, and see nothing of the beauty above and around them. And, thinking so, he would feel an impulse to arise and shout and waken men, but then, regretfully, he would admit that he was too old to surrender to this impulse, and would think too much before he spoke, and would end by prating like Gladstone or roaring like Tom Paine.