* * *
In a cabin where a signalman kept his eyes on an illuminated map over which little black snakes were crawling—trains coming and trains gone—I met an inspector who had been on London's electric railways for over thirty years!
"The changes I've seen?" he said. "Yet it's marvellous what we did in the old days. Do you know that we used to take eighty thousand people a day to exhibitions in the old steam trains? I'm not saying that we weren't a bit packed and a few children on the rack, but—we did it! Now, of course, everything is bigger, quicker, and better, and—you can have the good old days! I remember them and prefer these!
"Why, bless my soul, in the good old days we had to have a regular baby hunt nearly every night under the seats of the old trains. Anybody who didn't want a baby seemed to leave it in the Underground."
* * *
I bought a ticket like any ordinary unenlightened passenger and went back to London in a "smoker" with my thoughts straying to the man in the engine cab ahead, sitting there with his eyes glued to the little crème de menthe lights that tell him he can fly and thunder on through the darkness.
Marriage
A striped awning leads to the church. A narrow strip of scarlet carpet runs from kerb to porch. Policemen hold back the crowd.
Women—always women; and in such numbers, too, and in such remarkable variety. The lily livered misanthrope on a passing omnibus growls: "Another wretched wedding.... What women see in them I cannot imagine." Of course he cannot. Women with their relentless grip on essential realities, see in them the work of the world, the justification of all living—but, naturally, they do not reason it out like that. They go to "see the bride," or, dare I say, to see themselves as the bride, either as they once were or as they hope to be.