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her. They might as well cross the road as her. She looked up and down the market-place, and decided to go to the more impressive end, where there was a big red-brick building with a clock-tower, because she was always attracted by that kind of architecture, which reminded her of the big buildings around Hammersmith and Chiswick and Turnham Green. Though they were ugly she liked them better than the beautiful places in the West End, which were what they were not because the inhabitants of that detestable part of London really cared for beauty, but they all had nothing to do but talk and criticise each other to bits, so that people who were putting up a building were compelled to make it magnificent out of self-defence. But in Hammersmith and Chiswick and Turnham Green they were busy living, and had no time to chatter about the look of things. Down there it was the little houses that mattered. Not that they were pretty, either, but they sheltered lives that seemed to her, who had to bear the glaring discomfort of publicity, infinitely precious in their privateness. None of the women who lived in the rows of little houses in those ugly parts of London need ever feel as she was being made to feel by the four people who were keeping time with her on the opposite pavement.
    It was a shame. Because of them there seemed to lie on her a disagreeable obligation to move on, as if she were a criminal shadowed by the police. When a messenger boy, wheeling his bicycle across the pavement in front of her, stared into her eyes and stopped whistling, she ducked her head in a panic; and then made matters worse by looking back at him imploringly to persuade herself that there was nothing in his face but recognition of her beauty, so that it struck him that she was behaving oddly, and he came to a standstill, gaping. She hurried on with her head down until she bumped into woman who was coming out of a shop. Looking up to apologise she found that the little body’s eyes were set derisively on her coat, which was a very lovely fantasy in checks by Molyneux. She was not hurt by that, for often before she had noticed that good clothes, like any other form of fine art, were always greeted with ridicule when they were brought out into the open among ordinary people; and she knew that there is nothing base about this ridicule, since it springs, like the giggling of children who are taken to see a tragedy, not from a lack of sensibility but from its excess. Children are as far as possible from all knowledge of tragedy, ordinary people have few chances of encountering the rarer sorts of decoration, so these contacts are to them news of an unfamiliar variation in life. They are dismayed that it should exist at all, for it intimates that life covers a range far wider than the octave of their daily routine and that the demands which it may make upon them are endless and incalculable. They are dismayed, too, at its quality: for the beauty of tragedy, and the beauty of good clothes, which is one and the same beauty, asks from those who use it a sympathetic nobility and an unembittered but firm discontent with the emotion that is not right, with the colour, the line that is not right. It sends them off on that search for harmony which is as delicious as love for a woman who is perfect and loving, as agonising as love for a woman about whom one knows nothing, not even that she has been born. This is a hard thing to lay on children, on simple people. They will not have it, they pretend that what they have seen is of no significance, and merely a ludicrous accident of folly which calls for nothing from the sane but laughter. Essington had made her see all that when she had told him how the people in Cricklewood Broadway had giggled at her when her car had broken down on the way to the Fairshams’ at Harrow, and she had had to step out into the street in a Nicole Groult picture gown and cloak.
    That had been Essington’s thought; it was now hers. Though she