When they emerged from the dusty shabbiness of the Euston Road it was suddenly a perfect June morning. Now was the moment. She opened the letter unnoticed, with her eyes on the sunlit park-lined vista...... “London owes much to the fact that its main thoroughfares run east and west; walk westward in the morning down any one of them, or in the afternoon towards the east and whenever the sun shines you will see” ..... and without arousing his attention hurriedly read the few lines. Was that man still in London, trying to explain it to himself, or had he been obliged to go away, or perhaps to die? London is heaven and can’t be explained. To be sent away is to be sent out of heaven. “I’ve been telling,” useless words, coming thin and helpless out of darkness and pressing against darkness .... a desperate clutching at a borrowed performance to keep alive and keep on ... “my employers what I think of them just lately.” “Excellent. What have you told?” His unconscious voice steadied her; as the darkness drove nearer bringing thoughts that must not arrive. The morning changed to a painted scene, from which she turned away, catching the glance of the leaves near-by, trickily painted, as she turned to steer the eloquence flowing up in her mind. “Well, it was a whole point of view I saw suddenly in the train coming back after Easter. I read an essay, about a superannuated clerk, an extraordinary thing, very simple and well written, not in the least like an essay. But there was something in it that was horrible. The employers gave the old man a pension, with humorous benevolence. He is so surprised and so blissfully happy in having nothing to do but look at the green world for the rest of the time, that he feels nothing but gratitude. That’s all right, from his point of view, being that sort of old man. But how dare the firm be humorously benevolent? It is no case for _humour_. It is _not_ funny that prosperous people can use up lives on small fixed salaries that never increase beyond a certain point, no matter how well the employers get on, even if for the last few years they give pensions. And they don’t give pensions. If they do, they are thought most benevolent. The author, who is evidently in a way a thoughtful man, ought to have known this. He just wrote a thing that looks charming on the surface and is beautifully written and is really perfectly horrible and disgusting. Well, I suddenly thought employers ought to know. I don’t know what can be done. _I_ don’t want a pension. I hate working for a salary as it is. But employers ought to _know_ how fearfully unfair everything is. They ought to have their complacency smashed up.” He was engrossed. His foreign intelligence sympathised. Then she was right.