I did not often go to the Park in those hours when I had come to the end of my tether. You feel so acutely conscious of the gulf that cuts you off from social intercourse. I preferred to go to the British Museum and gaze at Rameses. The contemplation of that immeasurable aloofness has always given me rest and comfort. I have visited Rameses in many moments of poignant distress, and so it seemed natural to go to him when for the first time in my life I wanted food.

The material needs of life were becoming very much of an obsession. I realized with a start that I was no longer eager for the newspapers; I did not even trouble to look at the placards. Your vitality, unreplenished by comfortable food and sleep, instinctively fastens on those things that are essential to the maintenance of life. This is why your outcasts often appear stupid, stolid, almost mentally deficient. They know nothing of the affairs of the political or the literary world, they are unthrilled by the falling of dynasties, or the discovery of a planet. The avenues of interest open to the well-fed are closed to them, they are haunted always by the spectres, hunger and sleeplessness. For them so cruelly often there is only the street for a bed.