Then it was that I realised with a start that my housemaid was staring at me from the door in the grey March morning, and that I was not listening to Shelmerdene in a backwater of the Thames, but was in London, where there is less time for cherishing one's ideals than for enquiring into other people's.... THE END Transcriber Notes: Passages in italics were indicated by _underscores_. Small caps were replaced with ALL CAPS. Throughout the document, the oe ligature was replaced with "oe". Throughout the dialogues, there were words used to mimic accents of the speakers. Those words were retained as-is. Errors in punctuations and inconsistent hyphenation were not corrected unless otherwise noted. On page 19, "distate" was replaced with "distaste". End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The London Venture, by Michael Arlen