The treelit golden glow of Shaftesbury Avenue flowed through her; the smile of an old friend. The _wealth_ of swinging along up the bright ebb-way of the west-end, conscious of being, of the absence of desire to be elsewhere or other than herself. A future without prospects, the many doors she had tried, closed willingly by her own hand, the growing suspicion that nowhere in the world was a door that would open wide to receive her, the menace of an increasing fatigue, crises of withering mental pain, and then suddenly this incomparable sense of being plumb at the centre of rejoicing. Something always left within her that contradicted all the evidence. It compensated the failure of her efforts at conformity.... Yet to live outside the world of happenings, always to forget and escape, to be impatient, even scornful, of the calamities that moved in and out of it like a well-worn jest, was certainly wrong. But it could not be helped. It was forgetfulness, suddenly overtaking her in the midst of her busiest efforts ... memory ... a perpetual sudden blank ... and upon it broke forth this inexhaustible joy. The tappings of her feet on the beloved pavement were blows struck hilariously on the shoulder of a friend. To keep her voice from breaking forth she sang aloud in her mind, a soaring song unlimited by sound. The visit to the revolutionaries seemed already in the past, added to the long procession of events that broke up and scattered the moment she was awake at this lonely centre. Speech came towards her from within the echoes of the night; statements in unfamiliar shape. Years falling into words, dropping like fruit. She was full of strength for the end of the long walk; armed against the rush of associations waiting in her room; going swift and straight to dreamless sleep and the joy of another day. The long wide street was now all even light, a fused misty gold, broken close at hand by the opening of a dark byway. Within it was the figure of an old woman bent over the gutter. Lamplight fell upon the sheeny slopes of her shawl and tattered skirt. Familiar. Forgotten. The last, hidden truth of London, spoiling the night. She quickened her steps, gazing. Underneath the forward-falling crushed old bonnet shone the lower half of a bare scalp ... reddish ... studded with dull, wartlike knobs.... Unimaginable horror quietly there. Revealed. Welcome. The head turned stealthily as she passed and she met the expected side-long glance; naked recognition, leering from the awful face above the outstretched bare arm. It was herself, set in her path and waiting through all the years. Her beloved hated secret self, known to this old woman. The street was opening out to a circus. Across its broken lights moved the forms of people, confidently, in the approved open pattern of life, and she must go on, uselessly, unrevealed; bearing a semblance that was nothing but a screen set up, hiding what she was in the depths of her being.