‘You wouldn’t want it to be a museum,’ pointed out Sophia, ‘or a tea shop. I hate it being made into flats, too, but a house has got to work. It can’t just be a sort of frightful coy parasite, like all those forges and mills in Sussex that used to shoe horses and make bread, and now they sell expensive home-made cakes and are too ghastly refined and artistic for words.’

‘I should like a nice family to live in it.’

‘No nice family would. It’s too noisy. But three nasty rich families might, and I hope they will. I expect the people who built it were what we should call vulgarly rich. It’s queer … nowadays one reads about people’s publicity stunts and private aeroplanes and aimless travel and one thinks ‘How vulgar.’ But when one reads about people building enormous great Follies in the eighteenth century, like that one at High Wycombe with the gold ball on the top, it only seems like interesting eccentricity, and one talks about the decay of the Character or Worthy in contemporary English Life.’

‘I don’t.’

‘No, you don’t, because all you’re interested in is your boring Communism and India for the Indians and all the rest of it. If you’re not careful you’ll get so international that you’ll fade away, and there won’t be anything left of you except a sort of frightful Standard Woman, full of breathy enthusiasms about Work and Leisure and Culture and the Masses. Like boiled water, you’ll be.

‘I don’t care, so long as I’m intelligent.’

‘You’re welcome. I regard your Communism and Internationalism as profoundly anti-poetic, and that’s enough for me.’

One evening at the end of June Sophia came home by Tube, instead of by bus as she usually did in the summer, and slowly climbed the High Street to the summit of the Heath.

She paused to look down at London before she took the path down into the Vale; it rolled away terrifyingly on every side, far below, endlessly grey and delicate in the distance like some complex growth of the deep sea.

She was thinking, as she stared down at the city, of Keats’s cry ‘Oh, for a life of sensation rather than thought.’

It was impossible for her to come to any decision about the political and economic questions which were tearing at the world, let alone moral and social ones, and symptoms of mismanagement in the economic system like old Mrs Barker. The mere effort to decide made her mind feel bruised and whirling. Yet one could not ignore the misery on the earth; the North of England in the frost of industrial decline, violence and starvation in Europe, America staggering like a wounded golden giant.

Keats had known that the plunder of the senses could not be enjoyed in selfish peace.

‘None can usurp this height,’ returned that shade,

‘But those to whom the miseries of the world

Are misery, and will not let them rest.’

and