His first taste of the metropolis was exhilarating. Here was a new world. Every porter at the railway-station, every news-vendor, every street urchin, was the possessor of accumulated knowledge and experience of which he, John Baltazar, was denied a share. He read strange wisdom in the eyes of working girls and slatternly women. He bought all the evening papers, reeking, as they seemed, with the pregnant moment’s actuality. He went to a bookseller’s and bought every book and pamphlet bearing on the war. He would have an orgy of information. He would pluck the heart of the world’s mystery of blood and sacrifice. But where to begin? If he had but one solitary acquaintance in London, who could put him into the way of understanding, his course would be simple. But he found himself absolutely alone in an infinite mass of units, knit together by complexities of common ties. What he saw and felt, in his first eager search, reduced to dwindling point the petty tragedy of his own life. For greater issues were at stake than the revolution of mathematical thought by a new Theory of Groups. In the wholesale destruction of what were thought to be the immortal works of man, the loss of a few Chinese manuscripts counted as little as that of paper-bags for buns. For excursions into the geometry of Four Dimensional Space, or scholarly translation of the mild and benign Chinese classic, _The Book of Rewards and Punishments_, the world would have no use for another half-century. In face of the realities with which London confronted him, he felt that he had devoted his life to the pursuit of shadows. If only he could grasp these realities. If only he could merge himself into them, become part and parcel of them, bring his intellect and his bodily strength into the stupendous machine which he saw at work.