He brought out, sharply cut and certain, the immense effect of purposelessness in London that I was already indistinctly feeling. We found ourselves at last returning through Highgate Cemetery and Waterlow Park—and Ewart was talking. “Look at it there,” he said, stopping and pointing to the great vale of London spreading wide and far. “It’s like a sea—and we swim in it. And at last down we go, and then up we come—washed up here.” He swung his arms to the long slopes about us, tombs and headstones in long perspectives, in limitless rows. “We’re young, Ponderevo, but sooner or later our whitened memories will wash up on one of these beaches, on some such beach as this. George Ponderevo, F.R.S., Sidney Ewart, R.I.P. Look at the rows of ’em!” He paused. “Do you see that hand? The hand, I mean, pointing upward, on the top of a blunted obelisk. Yes. Well, that’s what I do for a living—when I’m not thinking, or drinking, or prowling, or making love, or pretending I’m trying to be a sculptor without either the money or the morals for a model. See? And I do those hearts afire and those pensive angel guardians with the palm of peace. Damned well I do ’em and damned cheap! I’m a sweated victim, Ponderevo...” That was the way of it, anyhow. I drank deep of talk that day; we went into theology, into philosophy; I had my first glimpse of socialism. I felt as though I had been silent in a silence since I and he had parted. At the thought of socialism Ewart’s moods changed for a time to a sort of energy. “After all, all this confounded vagueness _might_ be altered. If you could get men to work together...” It was a good talk that rambled through all the universe. I thought I was giving my mind refreshment, but indeed it was dissipation. All sorts of ideas, even now, carry me back as it were to a fountain-head, to Waterlow Park and my resuscitated Ewart. There stretches away south of us long garden slopes and white gravestones and the wide expanse of London, and somewhere in the picture is a red old wall, sun-warmed, and a great blaze of Michaelmas daisies set off with late golden sunflowers and a drift of mottled, blood-red, fallen leaves. It was with me that day as though I had lifted my head suddenly out of dull and immediate things and looked at life altogether.... But it played the very devil with the copying up of my arrears of notes to which I had vowed the latter half of that day.