He walked to Saint Paul's
Cathedral, and stood for a time near the door listening to the evening
service. The candles upon the altar reminded him in some odd way of the
fireflies at Fiesole. Then he walked back through the evening lights to
Westminster. He was oppressed, he was indeed scared, by his sense of the
immense consequences of his discovery. He had a vague idea that night
that he ought not to publish his results, that they were premature, that
some secret association of wise men should take care of his work and
hand it on from generation to generation until the world was riper for
its practical application. He felt that nobody in all the thousands of
people he passed had really awakened to the fact of change, they trusted
the world for what it was, not to alter too rapidly, to respect their
trusts, their assurances, their habits, their little accustomed traffics
and hard-won positions.
He went into those little gardens beneath the over-hanging, brightly-lit
masses of the Savoy Hotel and the Hotel Cecil. He sat down on a seat and
became aware of the talk of the two people next to him. It was the
talk of a young couple evidently on the eve of marriage. The man was
congratulating himself on having regular employment at last; 'they like
me,' he said, 'and I like the job.
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