In London I walked ignorant in an immensity, and
it was clear that among my fellow-students from the midlands and the
north I was ill-equipped and under-trained. With the utmost exertion I
should only take a secondary position among them. And finally, in the
third place, I was distracted by voluminous new interests; London took
hold of me, and Science, which had been the universe, shrank back to the
dimensions of tiresome little formulae compacted in a book. I came to
London in late September, and it was a very different London from
that great greyly-overcast, smoke-stained house-wilderness of my first
impressions. I reached it by Victoria and not by Cannon Street, and its
centre was now in Exhibition Road. It shone, pale amber, blue-grey
and tenderly spacious and fine under clear autumnal skies, a London of
hugely handsome buildings and vistas and distances, a London of gardens
and labyrinthine tall museums, of old trees and remote palaces and
artificial waters. I lodged near by in West Brompton at a house in a
little square.
So London faced me the second time, making me forget altogether for a
while the grey, drizzling city visage that had first looked upon me.
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