social intercourse. They prefer the comfortable torpor of the
fireside. If some imperative need of new interests torments them, they
seek relaxation in the music-hall or some other place of popular
resort. The art of conversation is almost extinct in a certain type of
Londoner. He knows nothing to converse about outside his business
interests, his family concerns, and perhaps the latest sensation of the
daily newspaper. Those lighter flights of fancy, those delicate
innuendoes and allusions of implied experience or culture--all the
give-and-take of happily contending minds--all, indeed, that makes true
conversation--is a science utterly unknown to him. A certain
superficial nimbleness of mind he does sometimes possess, but for all
that he is a dull creature, made dull by the limitations of his life.

If it should happen, as it often may, that such a man has some genuine
instinct for friendship, and has a friend to whom he can confide his
real thoughts, the chances are that his friend will be separated from
him by the mere vastness of London. To the rural mind the metropolis
appears an entity; in reality it is an empire. A journey from the
extreme north to the extreme south, from Muswell Hill to Dulwich, is
less easily accomplished, and often less speedily, than a journey from
London to Birmingham. There is none of that pleasant 'dropping-in' for
an evening which is possible in country towns of not immoderate radius.
Time-tables have to be consulted, engagement-books scanned, serious
preparations made, with the poor result, perhaps, of two hours' hurried
intercourse. The heartiest friendship does not long survive this
malignity of circumstance. It is something to know that you have a
friend, obscurely hidden in some corner of the metropolis; but you see
him so rarely, that when you meet, it is like forming a new friendship
rather than pursuing an old one. It is little wonder that, under such
conditions, visits grow more and more infrequent, and at last cease. A