There is always a crowd, there is
always food, you cannot be alone, and it is only in loneliness, as
Goethe says, that your perceptions put forth their flowers. No one in
London has time to listen: they are all thinking about who is there and
who isn't there, and what is the next thing. The exquisite present, as
you put it in one of your poems, has no existence there: it is always
the feverish future."
"Delicious phrase! I should have stolen that gem for my poor poems, if
you had discovered it before."
She was too much used to this incense to do more than sniff it in
unconsciously, and she went on with her tremendous indictment.
"It isn't that I find fault with London for being so busy," she said
with strict impartiality, "for if being busy was a crime, I am sure
there are few of us here who would escape hanging. But take my life
here, or yours for that matter. Well, mine if you like. Often and often
I am alone from breakfast till lunch-time, but in those hours I get
through more that is worth doing than London gets through in a day and
a night. I have an hour at my music not looking about and wondering who
my neighbours are, but learning, studying, drinking in divine melody.
Then I have my letters to write, and you know what that means, and I
still have time for an hour's reading so that when you come to tell me
lunch is ready, you will find that I have been wandering through
Venetian churches or sitting in that little dark room at Weimar, or was
it Leipsic? How would those same hours have passed in London?
"Sitting perhaps for half an hour in the Park, with dearest Aggie
pointing out to me, with thrills of breathless excitement, a woman who
was in the divorce court, or a coroneted bankrupt.
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