set forth full of hope and courage in the morning, only to return full of
the dejection of failure at night. And it was then London began to reveal
herself to him in her solidarity, under the cloud of dun-blue coal smoke
--it was wintertime--which, at once hanging over and penetrating her
immensity, adds the majesty of mystery to the majesty of mere size. He
noted how, in the chill twilights, London grew strangely and feverishly
alive. Lamps sprang into clearness along the pavements. A dazzling
glitter of shop windows marked the great thoroughfares, while often the
angry glare of a fire pulsed along the sky-line. When night comes in the
country, so Dominic told himself, the land sinks into peaceful repose.
But in cities it is otherwise. There the light leaves heaven for earth;
and walks the streets, with much else far from celestial, until the
small hours move towards the dawn and usher in the decencies of day.

Never before had he seen London thus and understood it in all its
enormous variety, yet as a unit, a whole. How much he actually beheld
with his bodily eyes, how much through the working of a rather exalted
condition of imagination induced by loneliness and bodily fatigue, he
could never subsequently determine. But the great city presented herself
to him in the guise of some prodigious living creature, breathing,
feeding, suffering, triumphing, above all mating and breeding, terrible
in her power and vitality, age old, yet still unspent. Presented herself
to him as horribly prolific, ever outpassing her own unwieldy limits,
sending forth her children, year after year, all the wide world over by
shipping or by rail; receiving some tithe of them back, proud with
accomplished fortune to enhance her glory, or, disgraced and broken,
slinking homeward to the cover of her fog and darkness merely to swell
the numbers of the nameless who rot and die. He thought of those others,
too--and this touched his young ardour with a quick shudder of personal
fear--whom she never sends forth at all; but holds close in bondage all