he grime of industry
struck a coarser and somberer note.

"I feel a million miles from home, which is just what I want to feel,"
declared Lady Thiselton. "And there is quite a market place opposite,
and bookstalls. This is just what Browning could have described. Why
did he not come here for inspiration? Here, too, he might have found a
square, old yellow book and paid eightpence for it, and tossed it in
the air and caught it again and twirled it about by the crumpled
vellum covers, and could have wandered on reading it through a
perilous path of fire-irons, tribes of tongs, shovels in sheaves,
skeleton bedsteads, wardrobe drawers agape, and cast clothes
a-sweetening in the sun. But the crowd is really too thick to walk
amongst. As we are on pleasure bent, let us be recklessly extravagant
and take a twopenny ride on top of a tram-car."

Morgan admitted he was beginning to find it unpleasant to be at such
close quarters with the crowd. Some of the people he was brushing up
against, he complained, were not too scrupulously clean.

"No doubt," he added, "I shall find them with their mysterious bundles
more picturesque from a distance."

"Why some of them are quite spick and span with their polished silk
hats, and there are any number of pretty girls. The shops, too, seem
quite attractive. I can even imagine myself living here for a time,
cannot you?"

"Let us get on our tram car. That may give my imagination the
necessary stimulus."

At first they had the top all to themselves, and were borne smoothly
onwards, cutting through the very centre of the turmoil. The red brick
church was the furthest point she had ever reached in the East of
London, Lady Thiselton informed Morgan. She had been in the
neighbourhood two or three times in company with her husband, who had
been interested in a sort of mission and dispensary combined, his idea
being not only to make wicked people religious, but to irritate the
devil by keeping their souls out of his clutch as long as possible.

"Now it is only like the High Street of a big provincial town," she
commented, after they had passed the London Hospital. "I think it's
getting monotonous."

Three begrimed, strapping youths came clambering up noisily and,
sitting immediately in front of them, continued a conversation about a
certain "she." Their vocabulary became so offensive that Lady
Thiselton whispered she thought it perfectly improper for a lady to
keep on looking at the backs