And yet it is true as I came to that corner
of the Park that, for some unreasonable reason of mood, I saw all London
as a strange city and the civilization itself as one enormous whim.
The Marble Arch itself, in its new insular position, with traffic
turning dizzily all about it, struck me as a placid monstrosity.
What could be wilder than to have a huge arched gateway, with people
going everywhere except under it? If I took down my front door
and stood it up all by itself in the middle of my back garden,
my village neighbours (in their simplicity) would probably stare.
Yet the Marble Arch is now precisely that; an elaborate entrance
and the only place by which no one can enter. By the new arrangement
its last weak pretence to be a gate has been taken away. The cabman
still cannot drive through it, but he can have the delights of riding
round it, and even (on foggy nights) the rapture of running into it.
It has been raised from the rank of a fiction to the dignity
of an obstacle.
As I began to walk across a corner of the Park, this sense of what
is strange in cities began to mingle with some sense of what is
stern as well as strange. It was one of those queer-coloured
winter days when a watery sky changes to pink and grey and green,
like an enormous opal. The trees stood up grey and angular,
as if in attitudes of agony; and here and there on benches under
the trees sat men as grey and angular as they.
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