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walking back. You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist. You can't help pining for it. There are some streets oh, my God!" And Gumbril Senior threw up his hands in horror. "It's like listening to a sym- phony of cats to walk along them. Senseless dis- cords and a horrible disorder all the way. And the one street that was really like a symphony by Mozart-how busily and gleefully they're pulling it down now! Another year and there'll be nothing left of Regent Street. There'll only be a jumble of huge hideous buildings at three-quarters of a million apiece. A concert of Brobdingnagian cats. Order has been turned into a disgusting chaos. We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the prem- ises, all the time." The old man paused and pulled his beard medita- tively. Gumbril Junior sat in silence, smoking; and in silence Shearwater revolved within the walls of his great round head his agonising thoughts of Mrs. Viveash. "It has always struck me as very curious," Gum- bril Senior went on, "that people are so little affected by the vile and discordant architecture around them. Suppose, now, that all these brass-bands of unem- ployed ex-soldiers that blow so mournfully at all the street corners, were suddenly to play nothing but a series of senseless and devilish discords-why, the first policeman would move them on, and the second would put them under arrest, and the passers-by would try to lynch them on their way to the police- station. There would be a real spontaneous outcry of indignation. But when at these same street cor- ners the contractors run up enormous palaces of