London gave her to the full the “damned anonymous” feeling, making her realise that she had no corner of her very own. The best of us have some measure of sensitive egoism, an individuality that longs to leave its personal impress upon something, even on the sand by the seashore, and London is nothing but a great, trampled cattle-pen, where thousands of hoofs leave nothing but a churn of mud. People build pigeon houses in their back yards, or train nasturtiums up strings, when they live down by Stepney. Farther westwards it is the sensitive individualism that makes many a Londoner country mad. The self-conscious self resents the sameness, the crowding mediocrity, the thousands of little tables that carry the same food for thousands of people, the thousands of seats in indistinguishable buses and cars, the thousands of little people who rush on the same little errands along the pavements. For there is a bitter uniformity even in the midst of a luxurious variety, when the purse limits the outlook, and a week at Southend-on-Sea may be the wildest of life’s adventures. Eve began to have the country hunger very badly. Autumn had gone, and the winter rains and fogs had set in, and her thoughts went back to Fernhill as she remembered it in summer, and as she imagined it in autumn. What a green and spacious world she had left. The hush of the pine woods on a windless day, when nothing moved save an occasional squirrel. The blaze of roses in June. The blue horizons, the great white clouds sailing, the purple heathland, the lush valleys with their glimmerings of water! What autumn pictures rose before her, tantalising her sense of beauty. She saw the bracken turning bronze and gold, the larch woods changing to amber, the maples and beeches flaming pyres of saffron, scarlet and gold. Those soft October mornings with the grass grey with dew, and the sunlight struggling with white mists. She began to thirst for beauty, and it was a thirst that picture galleries could not satisfy. Even that last letter of hers to Canterton toned with her feeling of cramped finality. She had written “No,” but often her heart cried “Yes,” with an impetuous yearning towards sympathy and understanding. What a masterful and creative figure was his when she compared him with these thousands of black-coated men who scuttled hither and thither on business that was someone else’s. She felt that she could be content with more spiritual things, with a subtle perfume of life that made this City existence seem gross and material and petty. Her daily walks from Highbury to Miss Champion’s helped to accentuate the tendencies of these moods of hers. Sometimes Kate Duveen would walk a great part of the way back with her, and Eve, who was the more impressionable of the two, led her friend into many suggestive discussions. Upper Street, Islington, saddened her. It seemed so typical of the social scheme from which she was trying to escape.