The shops were closed and black, except where a
tobacconist kept the tobacconist's bright and everlasting vigil; but above
the shops occasional rare windows were illuminated, giving
hints--dressing-tables, pictures, gas-globes--of intimate private lives. I
don't know why such hints should always seem to me pathetic, saddening;
but they do. And beneath them, through the dark defile of shutters,
motor-omnibuses roared and swayed and curved, too big for the street, and
dwarfing it. And automobiles threaded between them, and bicycles dared the
spaces that were left. From afar off there came a flying light, like a
shot out of a gun, and it grew into a man perched on a shuddering
contrivance that might have been invented by H.G. Wells, and swept
perilously into the contending currents, and by miracles emerged
untouched, and was gone, driven by the desire of the immortal soul within
the man. This strange thing happened again and again. The pavements were
crowded with hurrying or loitering souls, and the omnibuses and autos were
full of them: hundreds passed before the vision every moment. And they
were all preoccupied; they nearly all bore the weary, egotistic melancholy
that spreads like an infection at the close of a fete day in London; the
lights of a motor-omnibus would show the rapt faces of sixteen souls at
once in their glass cage, driving the vehicle on by their desires.
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