“Oh, it’s only what’s known all over the neighbourhood,” continued the girl. “She’s had a pretty rough time with him. Twice I’ve found her getting ready to go to sleep for the night by sitting on the bare floor with her back against the wall. Had sold every stick in the place and gone off. But she’d always some excuse for him. It was sure to be half her fault and the other half he couldn’t help. Now she’s got her ‘reward’ according to her own account. Heard he was dying in a doss-house, and must fetch him home and nurse him back to life. Seems he’s getting fonder of her every day. Now that he can’t do anything else.” “And it was here that you proposed to her,” said Joan.!

Joan flushed. What did he mean by cross-examining her in this way? She was not at all used to impertinence from the opposite sex. Joan thought his mistake lay in regarding man’s happiness as more important to him than his self-development. It was not what we got out of civilization but what we put into it that was our gain. Its luxuries and ostentations were, in themselves, perhaps bad for us. But the pursuit of them was good. It called forth thought and effort, sharpened our wits, strengthened our brains. Primitive man, content with his necessities, would never have produced genius. Art, literature, science would have been stillborn.

“Why couldn’t you have married?” asked Joan. “Dear lad,” said her father, “he would take the most dangerous work that he could find. But I wish he hadn’t been quite so impulsive. He could have been of more use helping me with this War Office contract. I suppose he never got my letter, telling him about it.” She saw the London of the future. Not the vision popular just then: a soaring whirl of machinery in motion, of moving pavements and flying omnibuses; of screaming gramophones and standardized “homes”: a city where Electricity was King and man its soulless slave. But a city of peace, of restful spaces, of leisured men and women; a city of fine streets and pleasant houses, where each could live his own life, learning freedom, individuality; a city of noble schools; of workshops that should be worthy of labour, filled with light and air; smoke and filth driven from the land: science, no longer bound to commercialism, having discovered cleaner forces; a city of gay playgrounds where children should learn laughter; of leafy walks where the creatures of the wood and field should be as welcome guests helping to teach sympathy and kindliness: a city of music, of colour, of gladness. Beauty worshipped as religion; ugliness banished as a sin: no ugly slums, no ugly cruelty, no slatternly women and brutalized men, no ugly, sobbing children; no ugly vice flaunting in every highway its insult to humanity: a city clad in beauty as with a living garment where God should walk with man.