Nevertheless he was at that moment particularly serious, and his seriousness was growing.  His secret engagement had affected him, in part directly, and in part by the intensification of ambitious endeavour which had resulted from contact with that fount of seriousness, Marguerite.  Although still entirely dependent—­even to cigarette money—­upon the benevolence of a couple of old individuals a hundred and fifty miles off, he reckoned that he was advancing in the world.  The Intermediate Examination was past, and already he felt that he had come to grips with the Final and would emerge victorious.  He felt too that his general knowledge and the force and variety of his ideas were increasing.  At times, when he and Marguerite talked, he was convinced that both of them had achieved absolute knowledge, and that their criticisms of the world were and would always be unanswerable.  After the Final, he hoped, his uncle would buy him a share in the Lucas & Enwright practice.  In due season, his engagement would be revealed, and all would be immensely impressed by his self-restraint and his good taste, and the marriage would occur, and he would be a London architect, an established man—­at the mature age of, say, twenty-two.

No cloud would have obscured the inward radiance caused by the lovely image of Marguerite and by his confidence in himself, had it not been for those criticisms of the world.  He had moods of being rather gravely concerned as to the world, and as to London.  He was recovering from the first great attack of London.  He saw faults in London.  He was capable of being disturbed by, for example, the ugliness and the inefficiency of London.  He even thought that something ought to be done about it.  Upon this Sunday morning, fresh from visions of Venice, and rendered a little complacent by the grim execution of the morning’s programme of work, he was positively pained by the aspect of Redcliffe Gardens.  The Redcliffe Arms public-house, locked and dead, which was the daily paradise of hundreds of human beings, and had given balm and illusion to whole generations, seemed simply horrible to him in its Sunday morning coma.  The large and stuffy unsightliness of it could not be borne. (However, the glimpse of a barmaid at an upper window interested him pleasantly for a moment.) And the Redcliffe Arms was the true gate to the stucco and areas of Redcliffe Gardens.  He looked down into the areas and saw therein the furtive existence of squalor behind barred windows.  All the obscene apparatus of London life was there.  And as he raised his eyes to the drawing-room and bedroom stories he found no relief.  His eyes could discover nothing that was not mean, ugly, frowzy, and unimaginative.  He pictured the heavy, gloomy, lethargic life within.  The slatternly servants pottering about the bases of the sooty buildings sickened and saddened him.  A solitary Earl’s Court omnibus that lumbered past with its sinister, sparse cargo seemed to be