There was a thing that began now to happen to Katherine of which she herself was only very dimly perceptive. She began to be aware of the living, actual participation in her life of the outside, abstract world. It was simply this—that, because so wonderful an event had transformed her own history, so also to everyone whom she saw, she felt that something wonderful must have happened. It came to more than this; she began now to be aware of London as something alive and perceptive in the very heart of its bricks and mortar, something that knew exactly her history and was watching to see what would come of it. She had always been concerned in the fortunes of those immediately about her—in the villages of Garth, in all her Trenchard relations—but they had filled her world. Now she could not go out of the Westminster house without wondering—about the two old maids in black bonnets who walked up and down Barton Street, about a tall gentleman with mutton-chop whiskers and a white bow, whom she often saw in Dean’s Yard, about a large woman with a tiny dog and painted eyebrows, about the young man with the bread, the young man with the milk, the very trim young man with the post, the very fat young man with the butcher’s cart, the two smart nursemaids with the babies of the idle rich, who were always together and deep in whispered conversation; the policeman at the right corner of the Square, who was friendly and human, and the policeman at the left corner who was not; the two young men in perfect attire and attaché cases who always lounged down Barton Street about six o’clock in the evening with scorn for all the world at the corners of their mouths, the old man with a brown muffler who sold boot laces at the corner of Barton Street, and the family with the barrel-organ who came on Friday mornings (man once been a soldier, woman pink shawl, baby in a basket), a thick-set, grave gentleman who must be somebody’s butler, because his white shirt was so stiff and his cheeks blue-black from shaving so often, a young man always in a hurry and so untidy that, until he came close to her, Katherine thought he must be Henry ... all those figures she had known for years and years, but they had been only figures, they had helped to make the pattern in the carpet, shapes and splashes of colour against the grey.