The carriage was full of men and women going to their places of business. There were tired young men, lame young men, pale and scarred young men, brown and fit young men, bored and _blasé_ young men, jolly and amused young men, and nearly all, however brown or fit or pale or languid or jolly or bored, bore a peculiar and unmistakable impress stamped, faintly or deeply, on their faces, their eyes, their carriage, the set of their shoulders. There were, among the business men and girls, women going shopping, impassive, without newspapers, gazing at the clothes of others, taking in their cost, their cut, their colour. This is an engrossing occupation. Those who practise it sit quite still, without a stir, a twinkle, a yawn, or a paper, and merely look, all over, up and down, from shoes to hat.... They are a strange and wonderful race of beings, these gazing women; one cannot see into their minds, or beyond their roving eyes. They bear less than any other section of the community the stamp of public events. The representatives of the type in the Bakerloo this morning did not carry any apparent impress of the Great War. It would take something more than a great war, something more even than a food crisis, to leave its mark on these sphinx-like and immobile countenances. Kingdoms may rise and fall, nations may reel in the death-grapple, but they sit gazing still, and their minds, amid the rocking chaos, may be imagined to be framing some such thoughts as these: "Those are nice shoes. I wonder if they're the ones Swan and Edgar have at 30s. She's trimmed her hat herself, and not well. That skirt is last year's shape. That's a smart coat. Dear me, what stockings; you'd think anyone would be ashamed." These women had not the air of reckless anticipation, of being alert for any happening, however queer, that, in differing degrees, marked the majority of people in these days. For that, in many, seemed the prevailing note; a series of events so surprising as to kill surprise, of disasters so appalling as to numb horror, had come and gone, leaving behind them this reckless touch, and with it a kind of greed, a determination to snatch whatever might be from life before it tumbled again into chaos. They had not been devoid of lessons in what moralists call Making the Best of It, those staggering years when everything had fallen and fallen, successively and simultaneously, civilisation, and governments, and hopes, and crowns, and nations, and soldiers, and rain, and tears, and bombs, and buildings, only not prices, or newspapers. For, if everything had so fallen once, it might even now be riding for a fall again (in spite of the League of Nations and other devices for propping up the unsteady framework of a lasting peace). The thing was to get what one could first. The thing, in the opinion of one traveller in that train, was to wear cap and bells, to dance through life to a barrel organ, to defeat a foolish universe with its own weapons.