ON GOING ABROAD

their enjoyment aloud are still more disturbing.
I can't help listening to them, and one cannot be
absorbed in the conversation of one's fellow-
creatures and in the Holy Family at the same time.
If you had brought me here yesterday, I might
have felt differently, so I shan't go so far as to
say that the picture is positively bad. But to-day
I simply don't enjoy looking at it. Don't let's
bother any more about pictures to-day. Come
along to a cafe." And how gladly we should
go!

When once you have settled down and feel
really at home in a new place, you need no longer
drag your imagination about in this fashion,
seeing the things you ought to see instead of the
things you wish to see. The resident alien in
London does not visit Westminster Abbey with
a guide-book, nor does he even go into the
National Gallery except when it is the whim of
his imagination to do so. If he likes London,
it is not because of the things that are marked
as important in the guide-books about London,
It is because of the things that he discovers
capriciously and by accident. He can live in his
own London, not in other people's London.
London becomes to him a city of personal associa-
tions and is no longer a mere capital of famous
sights. We are sometimes told that the American
visitor sees more of London than the people who
live in it. This, I think, is true only in a super-
ficial sense. The American sees more of guide-
book London, but the Londoner sees more of the
London that is worth seeing. He sees his own
house and his friend's houses—buildings that
contain far more of the things that make life
253