In London, the loneliest soul in the great city, he set himself to pick up the threads of the life around him. He walked the familiar and unwelcoming streets, at first dazed by the motor traction, then bewildered by evidences of the luxury which eighteen years of decadence had engendered. He visited new palaces of entertainment and came away wondering. In fashionable supper-rooms he saw the flower of the land dancing to what, as a scholar, he knew to be West African sexual rhythms. He could not understand. What were they doing, or trying to do? He would sit lonely at a table, a formally ordered drink before him, at one of these great public haunts, and try to get the key to the mystery. The decay of manners offended him. He discounted the fact that he had lived so many intense years in the land of sacred ceremonial; he wiped that out of his mind, and recalled the standard of his own youth. The exiguity of feminine apparel shocked his unaccustomed eyes; in many cases nothing from waist up but a sort of low palisade, scarcely concealing the bust. Was he not mistaken? Was this not rather the scum than the flower of modern England? But at neighbouring tables he had overheard attention being directed to bearers of proud and historic names. Then he asked himself the question: had he frequented such places eighteen years ago? Had they not been outside the sphere of his narrow academic life? He desired to judge justly. When did he leave England? In 1896. And his bachelor days, with their joyous London jaunts, had ended in 1894. There was no such social life then: if there had been, he would have heard of it. In the afternoons, too, these young men and maidens danced their weird dances. Outside, the land was a-clamour with the doings of a sterner sisterhood. Processions, mass meetings, virago riotings, picture slashings, incendiarism, bombs, formed the features of their astounding crusade. The newspapers, beyond the recounting of facts, with vivid descriptions of sensational scenes, gave him little information as to the philosophy of the movement. Politically the country seemed to be in a state of chaotic turmoil. Persons holding high office were publicly accused of corrupt financial practices. Parliament wrangled fiercely with the Army over an _opéra bouffe_ condition of Irish affairs. Beneath all this Labour uttered volcanic threatenings. Subversive ideas, new to him, such as syndicalism, were in the air. Unintelligible criticisms of picture exhibitions urged his curious steps to the indicated galleries, where he came upon canvases that made his brain reel. A new Rip Van Winkle, he had awakened to a mad world, a world even more perilously unstable than the China which he had left.