The link of locality held him
to London; he found a delight in topographical identifications that he
would have missed abroad. "Here--or a hundred feet below here," he could
say, "I used to eat my midday cutlets during my London University days.
Underneath here was Waterloo and the tiresome hunt for confusing trains.
Often have I stood waiting down there, bag in hand, and stared up into
the sky above the forest of signals, little thinking I should walk some
day a hundred yards in the air. And now in that very sky that was once a
grey smoke canopy, I circle in a monoplane."
During those three days Graham was so occupied with these distractions
that the vast political movements in progress outside his quarters had
but a small share of his attention. Those about him told him little.
Daily came Ostrog, the Boss, his Grand Vizier, his mayor of the palace,
to report in vague terms the steady establishment of his rule; "a little
trouble" soon to be settled in this city, "a slight disturbance" in that.
The song of the social revolt came to him no more; he never learned that
it had been forbidden in the municipal limits; and all the great emotions
of the crow's nest slumbered in his mind.
But on the second and third of the three days he found himself, in spite
of his interest in the daughter of the Pig Manager, or it may be by
reason of the thoughts her conversation suggested, remembering the girl
Helen Wotton, who had spoken to him so oddly at the Wind-Vane Keeper's
gathering.
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