Page:Soullondonasurv00fordgoog.djvu/186

RV 169 (REST IN LONDON) deemable—there will never be rest at all, but the great city will go staggering along through a series of changes in the nature of man.

But the contemplative portion of our psychologies seems to reply to these extremists that there is never any change in the nature of man. Furniture is, it is true, getting lighter and more flimsy; but the natural man will go on accumulating as much of it as he can, or as much as his servants or his wife can dust. And his grandson will go on—with variations dictated by the Fashions of his day—treasuring such of his grandfather's heavier and most costly pieces as he imagines will do credit to the family. There passes one's window every morning a Charity School: a hundred and twenty girls, each in gray skirts, gray cloaks, heavy boots, and straw hats. They have been drilled to adopt as nearly as possible a stereotyped walk, an odd sort of swing from the hips, and shuffle of the toes on the ground. They have eaten the same food, slept in the same long dormitories.—Turning off one's street there is a long narrow road of small houses, each precisely alike in dingy and indistinguishable architecture, each the same in rent, in chimneys, in window space.—Here, then, are stereotyped citizens and stereotyped houses.

Yet, in spite of the efforts of the good nuns to sap the individual spark in each of those girls, each has a different swing of the hips, cock of the shoulder, glance from the eye. And, in spite of the effort of the architect or jobbing builder to render each of those house-boxes indistinguishable from the other, each has 169