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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER H THE WINTEE AFTERNOON EXTRACTS from a letter written by Philip Mark to Mr. Paul Alexis in Moscow:— ", . . because, beyond question, it was the oddest chance that I should come—straight out of the fog, into the very house that I wanted. That, mind you, was a week ago, and I'm still here. You've never seen a London fog. I defy you to imagine either the choking, stifling nastiness of it or the comfortable happy indifference of English people under it. I couldn't have struck, if I'd tried for a year, anything more eloquent of the whole position—my position, I mean, and theirs and the probable result of our being up against one another. . . . This will be a long letter because, here I am quite unaccountably excited, unaccountably, I say, because it's all as quiet as the grave—after midnight, an old clock ticking out there on the stairs. Landseer's 'Dignity and Impudence' on the wall ever my bed and that old faded wall-paper that you only see in the bedrooms of the upper middles in England, who have lived for centuries and centuries in the same old house. Much too excited to sleep, simply I suppose because all kinds of things are beginning to reassert themselves on me—things that haven't stirred since I was eighteen, things that Anna and Moscow had so effectually laid to rest. All those years as a boy I had just this wall-paper, just this ticking-clock, just these faded volumes of 'Ivanhoe,' 'Kenil- worth', 'The Scarlet Letter' and Lytton's 'Night and Morning' that I see huddled together in the window. Ah, Paul,you've never known what all that means—the comfort, the safety, the muffled cosiness, the gradual decline of old familiar things from shabbiness to shabbiness, the candles, and pony-traps and apple-lofts and going to country dances in old, jolting cabs with t...
