I never had realized before how large a share animals played in our lives. The horse, I was told, had not existed in the British Province for a generation. Cats disappeared when the rodent virus was invented, and were now only to be found in a wild state in the woods. There seemed to be no dogs, and I did not ask David about them. There was no social life at all. The other inmates of the Strangers’ House were lodged on the different floors and ate in common, living under the watchful care of the deputies, who occasionally came to David for advice or instructions. Our only neighbor on the top floor was a little woman with two children who had come from a northern city and intended to return as soon as passes for leaving London, which had been stopped, were again issued. Inspectors from the Children’s Bureau visited her nearly every day, always leaving her in a condition of terror, as I inferred from a remark dropped by Elizabeth. Her husband had dropped dead in the street two months before. David told me that these sudden deaths were common, and were considered a triumph for medical science. And yet I knew that David had visitors after the solar lights went out. My room was at the end of the apartment near the street; but I heard strangers tiptoe along the passage, and whispered colloquies in David’s room. My host would appear abstracted the next morning, and watch me very thoughtfully. At such times I felt more than ever an intruder in the household. Yes, it was a world Lazaroff would have appreciated, could he have had his wish fulfilled, to be born into it. Would his viewpoint have changed, I wondered? It was a world from which all the amenities and charities of life seemed to have been banished. I tried to lead up to that subject in my talks with David, but he appeared unable to understand me. Was it an atheistic world? I had not ventured to question David about this. But I knew that there was no Sunday upon the calendar, and that the tenth day was the civil holiday. That day had fallen already, and endless crowds had marched through the streets, to the music of bands, to play-places in waste spots outside London. The Council supervised the games, which were compulsory. Of all the paternal regulations of the Council, this seemed to me the most arbitrary and oppressive. “We have to keep the people under discipline,” David explained. “Once they were allowed to wander at will; but they tore up the trees and flowers and strewed paper and broken bottles everywhere.” That was true. I remembered the public fields of my own age. I recalled how one writer had seen in them a complete indictment of democracy itself.