Englishmen," as though one were really a foreigner!—the circumstances are a little different, and he need never taste that first absolute loneliness, which, as the weeks go by and the words are not spoken, seems to open out a vista of solitude for all the days of life; nor need he be conscious that it is on himself—how, while it exaggerates, loneliness stifles self!—he must rely for every acquaintance, for every word spoken in his life. But for him there are aunts who live in Chester Square, and cousins who come up to stay a month or so at the Hyde Park Hotel, and uncles who live somewhere about Bruton Street, and have such a fund of risqué anecdotes that the length of Bond Street and Piccadilly will not see the end of them; and, perhaps, there are age-long friends of the family who have houses in Kensington and Hampstead, and "nice" parquet floors on which you can dance to a gramophone; while for an Armenian, who soon realises that his nationality is considered as something of a faux pas, there are none of these things, and he is [pg 018] entirely lost in the wilderness, for there is no solid background to his existence in another's country; and, as the days lengthen out and he grows tired of walking in the Green Park, he comes to wonder why his fathers ever left Hayastan; for it seems to me much better to be a murdered prince in Hayastan than a living vagabond in London. So I wandered about, moved my chambers gradually from Earl's Court to the heart of St. James's and read "Manon Lescaut," and sat in front of Gainsborough's "Musidora" until I found that she had three legs, and could never look at it again. [pg 017] [pg 018] Then, somehow, came acquaintance, first of the world, then of literature and its parasites; came teas at Golder's Green and Hampstead, and queerly serious discussions about sub-consciousness; "rags" at Chelsea, and "dalliance with grubbiness," and women. Through this early maze of ribaldry and discussion, the first of which bored me because of its self-consciousness, and because I do not like lying on the dirty floors of studios with candle grease dripping on me, and the latter which affected my years miserably and [pg 019] almost entirely perverted my natural amiability into a morbid distaste for living (which still breaks out at odd moments, and has branded me among many people as a depressing and damnably superior young person); through this maze of smoke and talk I can only still see the occasional personality of Mr. D. H. Lawrence, as his clear, grey eyes—there is no equivalent to spirituel in English—flashed from face to face, smiling sometimes, often but a vehicle for those
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