Page:Triangles of life, and other stories.djvu/132

120 writing now. If I do, I'll say so—and probably kick myself. I have so often had occasion to kick myself that I am getting hardened to it.

This Londoner says that he'll go past St. Paul's every day for nine days and see nothing in it, but on the tenth day he'll look up and have a feeling. I suppose when I go back to Sydney and see the General Post Office or the Town Hall, I'll have a feeling too—because of many things; but when I was in Sydney I passed those buildings nearly every day for years, and the only feeling I had was one of resentment, called up by the vicinity of a cheap restaurant in which I did a six months' perish in other and braver years. Different billets make men look at things in different ways.

English home people are remarkable for their invulnerable common sense, but they allow the appearance of an awful lot of senseless idolatry in London. And worse!—there is in London a fashionable dog graveyard—headstones and all complete—and on one of those headstones the fashionable bereaved one expresses a hope that she'll meet her darling in heaven. But I didn't mean to touch on that; I'm not ready for it yet. Such things excite me.

I take off my hat and go into St. Paul's (you have to take off your hat, and that fact is pregnant). I take off my hat and go into St. Paul's, expecting to be impressed and awed—and wishing to be. I think it's a very good and hopeful thing to be impressed, and to feel a reverence for something in these shallow cowardly days of a false feeling of manliness, and of the sex problem. But the interior of St. Paul's does