stupid person or a child: "It's the dinner hour with your mates and the snacks of talk between whiles loading barrows. Don't you see?" He paused again for a long time and then added: "London's the place." He could not think of going back.
Thus what London attracts with the mirage of its work shining across the counties and the countries, London holds with the glamour of its leisure. We never go back, never really and absolutely: London for those who have once, for however short a space, been Londoners, is always on the cards, is always just beyond the horizon. We may "go back" to the country for our health's sake, for our children’s health's sake, if we can. We may "go back" in a sense to the Colonies because we are not fitted for life or for work in London. But all the time London is calling; it calls in the middle of our work, it calls at odd moments like the fever of spring that stirs each year in the blood. It seems to offer romantically, not streets paved with gold but streets filled with leisure, streets where we shall saunter, things for the eye to rest on in a gray and glamorous light, books to read, men to be idle with, women to love.
If the idea of the "working classes" seems to call up a picture of the black plains of the East End, the picture when the "leisured classes" are in consideration is that of a circumscribed parallelogram of rows of tall buildings. It is a square block like a fortress that we all, more or less, are besieging—the little plot of ground bounded on the south by Piccadilly, on the west by the
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