The degree
in mathematics and chemistry appealed to me as particularly
congenial--albeit giddily inaccessible. I set to work. I had presently
to arrange a holiday and go to London to matriculate, and so it was I
came upon my aunt and uncle again. In many ways that visit marked an
epoch. It was my first impression of London at all. I was then nineteen,
and by a conspiracy of chances my nearest approach to that human
wilderness had been my brief visit to Chatham. Chatham too had been my
largest town. So that I got London at last with an exceptional freshness
of effect, as the sudden revelation of a whole unsuspected other side to
life.
I came to it on a dull and smoky day by the South Eastern Railway, and
our train was half an hour late, stopping and going on and stopping
again. I marked beyond Chiselhurst the growing multitude of villas,
and so came stage by stage through multiplying houses and diminishing
interspaces of market garden and dingy grass to regions of interlacing
railway lines, big factories, gasometers and wide reeking swamps of
dingy little homes, more of them and more and more.
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