The houses stood up straight and sinister, thousands of houses unendingly succeeding each other. Some were brilliantly illuminated; some were dark; and some had one or two windows lighted. The phenomenon of a solitary window lighted, high up in a house, filled me with the sense of the tragic romance of London. Why, I cannot tell. But it did. London grew to be almost unbearably mournful. There were too many people in London. Suffering was packed too close. One can contemplate a single affliction with some equanimity, but a million griefs, calamities, frustrations, elbowing each other--No, no! And in all that multitude of sadnesses I felt that mine was the worst. My loneliness, my fear, my foolish youth, my inability to cope with circumstance, my appalling ignorance of the very things which I ought to know! It was awful. And yet even then, in that despairing certainty of disaster, I was conscious of the beauty of life, the beauty of life's exceeding sorrow, and I hugged it to me, like a red-hot iron. We crossed a great river by a great bridge--a mysterious and mighty stream; and then the streets closed in on us again. And at last, after hours and hours, the omnibus swerved into a dark road and stopped--stopped finally. 'Putney!' cried the conductor, like fate. I descended. Far off, at the end of the vista of the dark road, I saw a red lamp. I knew that in large cities a red lamp indicated a doctor: it was the one useful thing that I did know. I approached the red lamp, cautiously, on the other side of the street. Then some power forced me to cross the street and open a wicket. And in the red glow of the lamp I saw an ivory button which I pushed. I could plainly hear the result; it made me tremble. I had a narrow escape of running away. The door was flung wide, and a middle-aged woman appeared in the bright light of the interior of the house. She had a kind face. It is astounding, the number of kind faces one meets. 'Is the doctor in?' I asked. I would have given a year of my life to hear her say 'No.' 'Yes, miss,' she said. 'Will you step in?' Events seemed to be moving all too rapidly. I passed into a narrow hall, with an empty hat-rack, and so into the surgery. From the back of the house came the sound of a piano--scales, played very slowly. The surgery was empty. I noticed a card with letters of the alphabet printed on it in different sizes; and then the piano ceased, and there was the humming of an air in the passage, and a tall man in a frock-coat, slippered and spectacled, came into the surgery. 'Good-evening, madam,' he said gruffly. 'Won't you sit down?' 'I--I--I want to ask you--' He put a chair for me, and I dropped into it. 'There!' he said, after a moment. 'You felt as if you might faint, didn't you?' I nodded. The tears came into my eyes. 'I thought so,' he said. 'I'll just give you a draught, if you don't mind.' He busied himself behind me, and presently I was drinking something out of a conical-shaped glass.