Excerpt from Heaven and Charing Cross

I, who have known them all - poor Adela, her husband, young Martin and the rest - will tell you of their lives.

Here, in my spinal chair, with one supreme exception, my life is only inward. Fulfilled and filled again though it may be, I welcome all adventurers, their loves and lusts and failures and high hopes. My sympathy has grown a chamois-hunter. It scales the heights, as I once scaled that actual mountain that threw me from it into this most subtle chair. Instead of play of muscles, I now have play of springs and cogs and sympathetic wheels. No woman (but the one) has ever answered to my hand and mood as does my chair. At first each movement squeaked a "Finis" to all my hopes and lusts and loves. Now, hopes are all for others, lusts are put to sleep for ever. If love remains, it is because a miracle was sent, but this is not my story.

Knowing them all so well, hearing the story from so many sides, I could supply the very words they often used. It is all clear enough to me. The task will be to show it as it was. No one could make it quite uninteresting.

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