not so. My first real thrill came to me in Piccadilly. It went all
over me in little shivers and came out at the ends of my fingers, and
then began once more at the base of my brain and did it all over
again.

But what is the use of describing one's first view of London streets
and traffic to the initiated? Can they, who became used to it as
children, appreciate it? Can they look back and recall how it struck
them? No. When I try to tell Americans over here they look at me
curiously and say, "Dear me, how odd!" The way they say it leaves me
to draw any one of three conclusions: either they are not
impressionable, and are therefore honest in denying the feeling; or
they think it vulgar to admit it; or I am the only grown person in
America who never has been to Europe before.

But I am indifferent to their opinion. People are right in saying this
great tremendous rush of feeling can come but once. It is like being
in love for the first time. You like it and yet you don't like it. You
wish it would go away, yet you fear that it will go all too soon. It
gets into your head and makes you dizzy, and you want to shut your
eyes, but you are afraid if you do that you will miss something. You
cannot eat and you cannot sleep, and you feel that you have two
consciousnesses: one which belongs to the life you have lived
hitherto, and which still is going on, somewhere in the world,
unmindful of you, and you unmindful of it; and the other is this new
bliss which is beating in your veins and sounding in your ears and
shining before your eyes, which no one knows and no one dreams of, but
which keeps a smile on your lips--a smile which has in it nothing of
humor, nothing from the great without, but which-comes from the secret
recesses of your own inner consciousness, where the heart of the