their conquest--which is a thing precarious, and, therefore, the most
precious, possessing you if only by the fear of unworthiness rather than
possessed by you. Moreover, as we sat together in the same railway
carriage, they were looking forward to a voyage in space, whereas I felt
more and more plainly, that what I had started on was a journey in time,
into the past; a fearful enough prospect for the most consistent, but to
him who had not known how to preserve against his impulses the order and
continuity of his life--so that at times it presented itself to his
conscience as a series of betrayals--still more dreadful.

I down here these thoughts so exclusively personal, to explain why there
was no room in my consciousness for the apprehension of a European war. I
don't mean to say that I ignored the possibility; I simply did not think
of it. And it made no difference; for if I had thought of it, it could
only have been in the lame and inconclusive way of the common uninitiated
mortals; and I am sure that nothing short of intellectual
certitude--obviously unattainable by the man in the street--could have
stayed me on that journey which now that I had started on it seemed an
irrevocable thing, a necessity of my self-respect.

London, the London before the war, flaunting its enormous glare, as of a
monstrous conflagration up into the black sky--with its best Venice-like
aspect of rainy evenings, the wet asphalted streets lying with the sheen
of sleeping water in winding canals, and the great houses of the city
towering all dark, like empty palaces, above the reflected lights of the
glistening roadway.

Everything in the subdued incomplete night-life around the Mansion House
went on normally with its fascinating air of a dead commercial city of
sombre walls through which the inextinguishable activity of its millions