d, who had gone to the window and
was looking down in the night, and said shyly, "This is a very fine
room," but, she knew, too softly to reach such markedly inattentive
ears. She stood there awkwardly, feeling herself suspended till this
woman should take notice of her. If her mother had been with her they
would have had a room with two beds, and would have talked before they
went to sleep of the day and its wonderful ending in this grand place.
She sighed. Mrs. Yaverland turned round.

"Come and look at your view," she said, and raised the sash so that they
could lean out.

Beneath there was a deep drop of the windless, scentless darkness that
night brings to modern cities; then a narrow trench of unlit gardens
obscured by the threadbare texture of leafless tree-tops, then a broad
luminous channel of roadway, lined with trees whose natural substance
was so changed by the unnatural light that they looked like toy trees
made of some brittle composition, and traversed by tramcars glowing
orange and twanging white sparks from invisible wires with their
invisible arms; at its further edge a long procession of lights stood
with a certain pomp along a dark margin, beyond which were black flowing
waters. To the left, from behind tall cliffs of masonry pierced with
innumerable windows that were not lit, yet gleamed like the eyes of a
blind dog, there jutted out the last spans of a bridge, set thickly with
large lights whose images bobbed on the current beneath like vast yellow
water-flowers. On another bridge to the right a train was casting down
on the stream a redness that was fire rather than light. On the opposite
bank of the river, at the base of black towers, barges softly dark like
melancholy lay on the different harsher darkness of the water, and
showed, so sparsely that they looked the richer, a few ruby and emerald
lights. Above, stars crackled frostily, close to earth, as stars do in
winter.

"That is the river," said Mrs. Yaverland.

She said it as if she desired to be out of this warmth, standing over
there by the dark parapet marked by the line of lamps close to the
flowing waters; as if she would have liked all the beautiful bright
lights to be extinguished, so that there would be nothing left but the
dark waters.

Ellen went and sat down on the bed. There was a standard lamp beside it,
whose light, curbed to a small rosy cloud by a silken shade like a
fairy's frock, seemed much the best thing for her eyes