er by the wrist. "We're going to see
life. You promised."

"Seeing life" was the phrase they used for their habit of strolling
through the town after dark. The social life of Santa Marina was carried
on almost entirely by lamp-light, which the warmth of the nights and the
scents culled from flowers made pleasant enough. The young women, with
their hair magnificently swept in coils, a red flower behind the ear,
sat on the doorsteps, or issued out on to balconies, while the young men
ranged up and down beneath, shouting up a greeting from time to time and
stopping here and there to enter into amorous talk. At the open windows
merchants could be seen making up the day's account, and older women
lifting jars from shelf to shelf. The streets were full of people, men
for the most part, who interchanged their views of the world as they
walked, or gathered round the wine-tables at the street corner, where an
old cripple was twanging his guitar strings, while a poor girl cried
her passionate song in the gutter. The two Englishwomen excited some
friendly curiosity, but no one molested them.

Helen sauntered on, observing the different people in their shabby
clothes, who seemed so careless and so natural, with satisfaction.

"Just think of the Mall to-night!" she exclaimed at length. "It's the
fifteenth of March. Perhaps there's a Court." She thought of the crowd
waiting in the cold spring air to see the grand carriages go by. "It's
very cold, if it's not raining," she said. "First there are men selling
picture postcards; then there are wretched little shop-girls with round
bandboxes; then there are bank clerks in tail coats; and then--any
number of dressmakers. People from South Kensington drive up in a
hired fly; officials have a pair of bays; earls, on the other hand, are
allowed one footman to stand up behind; dukes have two, royal dukes--so
I was told--have three; the king, I suppose, can have as many as he
likes. And the people believe in it!"

Out here it seemed as though the people of England must be shaped in the
body like the kings and queens, knights and pawns of the chessboard, so
strange were their differences, so marked and so implicitly believed in.

They had to part in order to circumvent a crowd.

"They believe in God," said Rachel as they regained each other. She
meant that the people in the crowd believed in Him; for she remembered
the crosses with bleeding plaster figures that stood where foot-paths
joine