II + 

In November Neville and Gerda, now both convalescent, joined Rodney in their town flat. Rodney thought London would buck Neville up. London does buck you up, even if it is November and there is no gulf stream and not much coal. For there is always music and always people. Neville had a critical appreciation of both. Then, for comic relief, there are politics. You cannot be really bored with a world which contains the mother of Parliaments, particularly if her news is communicated to you at first hand by one of her members. Disgusted you may be and are, if you are a right-minded person, but at least not bored. + 

What variety, what excitement, what a moving picture show, is this tragic and comic planet! Why want to be useful, why indulge such tedious inanities as ambitions, why dream wistfully of doing one’s bit, making one’s work, in a world already as full of bits, bright, coloured, absurd bits, like a kaleidoscope, as full of marks (mostly black marks) as a novel from a free library? A dark and bad and bitter world, of course, full of folly, wickedness and misery, sick with poverty and pain, so that at times the only thing Neville could bear to do in it was to sit on some dreadful committee thinking of ameliorations for the lot of the very poor, or to go and visit Pamela in Hoxton and help her with some job or other⁠—that kind of direct, immediate, human thing, which was a sop to uneasiness and pity such as the political work she dabbled in, however similar its ultimate aim, could never be. + 