He couldn’t see. He knew that he could never see it in that light. It was going to take all the beauty that he had conceived out of his life. It was going to ruin all his happiness. In place of light and cleanliness and learning it was going to give him . . . what? The darkness of a smoky city; its grime; the mean ideals of the people who lived beneath its ugliness. Even the memory of the enthusiasm with which he had thought of the life of old Dr. Marshall, his father’s patron, couldn’t mitigate the dreariness of the prospect. The idea of living for ever in company with dirt and misery and harrowing disease repelled him. It was no good telling him that contact with these misfortunes developed the nobler faculties of man. It was not the life that he had wanted. His soul sent forth a cry of exceeding bitterness. And while he sat there, full of misery and resentment, the train was carrying them onward into the gloom that always overshadowed the City of Iron. BOOK II . . . _so that with much ado I was corrupted_, _and made to learn the dirty devices of the world_. THOMAS TRAHERNE. CHAPTER I THE CITY OF IRON I THE city of iron stands upon three hills and its valleys were once watered by two rivers; but since the day when its name was humbly written in Doomsday these pastoral features have disappeared, so that the hills are only known as tramway gradients that testify to the excellence of the Corporation’s power station, and the rivers, running in brick culverts, have been deprived not only of their liberty but even of their natural function of receiving a portion of the city’s gigantic sewage. The original market of North Bromwich has been not so much debauched from without, in the manner of other growing towns, as organised from within by the development of its own inherent powers for evil. It is not a place from which men have wilfully cast out beauty so much as one from which beauty has vanished in spite of man’s pitiful aspirations to preserve it. Indeed, its citizens are objects rather for pity than for reproach, and would be astonished to receive either, for many of them are wealthy, and from their childhood, knowing no better, have believed that wealth is a justification and an apology for every mortal evil from ugliness to original sin.