The Peter Street romance had just begun, but it had passed away from Peter Street.
He walked to Marylebone in a dream, and when he was there he had to pull himself together to listen with sympathy to Peter's excitement about this new monthly paper of which Peter was to be editor, the paper that was to transform the world.
He left Peter and Millie talking at the table, went to the window and looked out. As he saw the people passing up and down below them of a sudden he loved them all.
The events of the last month came crowding to him—everything that had happened: the first sight of Christina in the Circus, the first visit to Duncombe, the Hill Street library and his love for it, his interviews with Mrs. Tenssen, the day when he had given Christina luncheon in the little Spanish restaurant, Duncombe and the garden and Lady Bell-Hall, his struggles with his novel, his recovery of the old Edinburgh life, Sir Walter and his smile, the row with Tom Duncombe, the meals and the theatres and the talks with Peter. Millie's trouble and Peter's wife, his fight with Baxter, Duncombe's last talk with him and his death, the last time with Christina, to-day's Unknown Warrior—yes, and smaller things than these: sunsets and sunrises, people passing in the street, the wind in the Duncombe orchard, books new and old, his little room in Panton Street, the vista of Piccadilly Circus on a sunlit afternoon, all London and beyond it, England whom he loved so passionately, and beyond her the world to its furthest and darkest fastnesses. What a time to be alive, what a time to be young in, the enchantment, the miraculous enchantment of life!
"I am he attesting sympathy (shall I make my list of things in the house and ship the house that supports them?).
"I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.
"My gait is no fault-finder's or rejector's gait, I moisten the roots of all that has grown.
"This minute that comes to me over the past decillions.