ed in the doorway
to see if he was at his ease, he thought the visitor and the macaw on
its perch were about equally exotic.

They started immediately after lunch and, as always, the drive along the
river inspired Michael with a jolly conception of the adventurousness of
London. It was impossible to hear the gurgle of the high spring-tide
without exulting in the movement of the stream that was washing out with
its flood all the listlessness of the hot August afternoon. When Chelsea
Bridge was left behind, the mystery of the banks of a great river
sweeping through a great city began to be more evident. The whole
character of the Embankment changed at every hundred yards. First there
was that somber canal which, flowing under the road straight from the
Thames, reappeared between a canyon of gloomy houses and vanished again
underground not very unlike the Styx. Then came what was apparently a
large private house which had been gutted of the tokens of humanity and
filled with monstrous wheels and cylinders and pistons, all moving
perpetually and slowly with a curious absence of noise. Under Grosvenor
Road Bridge they went, the horse clattering forward and a train crashing
overhead. Out again from slimy bricks and girders dripping with the
excrement of railway-engines, they came into Grosvenor Road. They passed
the first habitations of Pimlico, two or three terraces and isolated
houses all different in character. There could scarcely be another road
in London so varied as this. Maurice had been wise to have his studio in
Grosvenor Road. From the Houses of Parliament to Chelsea Bridge was an
epitome of London.

The hansom turned to the left up Clapperton Street, a very wide
thoroughfare of houses with heavy porticoes, a very wide and very gray
street, of a gray that almost achieved the effect of positive color, so
insistent was it. Michael remembered that there had been a Clapperton
Street murder, and he wondered behind which of those muslin curtains the
poison had been mixed. It was a street of quite extraordinarily sinister
respectableness. It brooded with a mediocre prosperity, very wide and
very gray and very silent. The columns of the porticoes were checked off
by the window of the cab with dull regularity, and the noise of the
horse's hoofs echoed hollowly down the empty street, to which every
evening men with black shiny bags would come hurrying home. It was
impossible to imagine a nursemaid lolling over a perambulato