will not have seen them in the Kensington-plus-Cornhill that is his London. But an intangible cloud-like population of white-faced misery, may come suddenly to disturb his ideas of Hoxton or Highgate, of Shoreditch or of Canning Town. Or the comparatively contented mechanician is suddenly confronted with his continental confrère's picture of the luxury, the profusion, the lust, the wantonness, of a foreign view of Hyde Park. In front of the dark eyes, the flashing teeth, the blue blouse, he will grow uncomfortably uncertain whether, outside his own Walthamstow of small pleasant houses, all the valley of the Thames is not Sodom and Gomorrah. Once away from the few facts that he can, as it were, catch hold of with his hands, he knows, your Londoner, so appallingly little of his London. It isn't his business; he has his own affairs. In the gigantic tool-basket of a place he can find pretty well whatever he needs. He will be surprised if others cannot.
VI
London is a great, slip-shod, easy-going, good-humoured magnet; those it attracts are much of a muchness with itself. They have not any Corporate spirit in particular. And the Londoner when talked to by inhabitants of other considerable towns is apt to be violently confronted with what he hasn't. It is not only that in Essen or Düsseldorf he will learn that he has no factories each employing sixteen skilled chemists continually analysing slag-heaps for by-products; that
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