He thought of himself as he was now, and of Ellen as she had been.

The memory of that visit to Garden Green seemed suddenly like a nightmare.
The memory of the train, underground for part of the way, with its stuffy odors, made him shiver.

The hot, dusty, unmade street, with its hideous rows of stuccoed villas, loomed before his eyes and confirmed his swiftly born disinclination to taking at once this final and ominous step.

Something all the time seemed to be drawing him in another direction, the faint magic of a fragrant memory--a dream, was it--that he had carried with him unconsciously through a wilderness of empty days?
He hesitated, and finally climbed up on to the garden seat of an omnibus on its way to Victoria..