A sudden sense of freedom came over her when she walked out of the station enclosure, after paying and tipping the driver of the growler, who was surprised at the amount of the tip. She had been delivered from suburbia, and her escape from Bosnia Road made her the more conscious of the largeness and the stimulating complexity of life. She felt a new exhilaration, and a sense of adventure that glimpsed more spacious happenings. It was more like the mood that is ascribed to the young man who rides out alone, tossing an audacious sword. Eve decided to treat herself to a good lunch for once, and she walked to Kate Duveen’s Italian restaurant in Soho, and amplified and capped the meal with a half bottle of claret, coffee, and a liqueur. She guessed that she had plenty of Aerated Bread shop meals before her. After lunch she took a motor-bus to the Marble Arch, wandered into the park, and down to the Serpentine, and discovering an empty seat, took the opportunity of reviewing her finances. She found that she had five pounds sixteen shillings and fivepence left. The Bloomsbury hotel charged four and sixpence for bed and breakfast, and she would be able to stay there for some three weeks, if she had the rest of her meals at tea-shops and cheap restaurants. Eve sat there for an hour, watching the glimmer of the water and the moving figures, growing more and more conscious of the vast, subdued murmur that drifted to her from beyond the bare trees. Neither the pitch nor the volume of the sound varied, though it was pierced now and again by the near note of a motor horn. The murmur went on and on, grinding out its under-chant that was made up of the rumbling of wheels, the plodding of hoofs, the hooting of horns, the rattle and pant of machinery, the voices of men and women. This green space seemed a spot of silence in the thick of a whirl of throbbing, quivering movement. She had always hated London traffic, but to-day it had something to say to her. The sun shone, the spring was in, and it was warm there, sitting on the seat. The water blinked, sparrows chirped, waterfowl uttered their cries, children played, daffodils were in bloom. Eve felt herself moving suddenly to a fuller consciousness of modern life. Her brain seemed to pulsate with it, to glow with a new understanding. Conquest! She could understand the feverish and half savage passion for conquest that seized many men. To climb above the crowd, to get money, to assert one’s individuality, brutally perhaps, but at all costs and against all comers. People got trampled on, trodden under. It was a stampede, and the stronger and the more selfish animals survived. Yet society had some sort of legal conscience. It had to make some show of clearing up its rubbish and its wreckage. The pity of it was that there was so much “afterthought,” when “forethought” might have saved so much disease and disaster.