But there was once a month of November, about which I could not so grandly say that I would not like to spend it in London; for something happened which threw me in a great hurly-burly of change into an uncomfortable little flat in Monday Road, which is in South Kensington, but for all the life and gaiety there is in it might just as well be in a scrubby corner of the Sahara on a dusty day. My father had died suddenly, and what little question there was of my ever going into business now dropped away, so I had to make at least a pretence of earning my living, or, rather, of making a career for myself. I was very definite about this, that I must _do something, be something_: for I had learnt this much of the world, that there is no room in it for casual comers, that a man must have a background (any background will do, but the more individual the better); that there is no room in any part soever of the social scale for a man who is just nothing at all; and as I have never seriously contemplated living exclusively in the company of landladies and their friends, I saw that I must put my back into it and cease being a very insignificant _rentier_. I couldn't bear the idea of going through life as just a complacent Armenian in a world where millions and millions of others were trying honestly and otherwise to climb up the greasy pole of respectable attainment. But I cannot resist saying what I think of Monday Road, though I am sure I can do it no harm, because better men than I must have hated it, and more virulently. Monday Road, like all the other roads which sink their mutual differences into the so dreary Fulham Road, consists of large, equal-faced houses stuck together in two opposite rows which are separated by about fifteen yards or so of second-hand Tarmac; a road like another, you will mildly say, but you cannot possibly realise its dismal grimness if you have not lived there. The people who live in the angular-faced houses are artists who believe in art for art's sake--else they wouldn't be forced to live in the dismalest street in the world--amateur intellectuals like myself, and various sorts of women. The tribe of organ-grinders have a great weakness for Monday Road, probably because some tactless ass has stuck up a notice there that "Barrel-organs are prohibited," which is a silly thing to say if you can't enforce it. Altogether it is the sort of road in which a "spinster lady" might at any moment lock her door, close her windows, turn on the gas, and read a novel to death. A woman in the flat next to mine did that a week after I arrived, and I have never viewed death more sympathetically.