ss thou feel thyself inferior to all ... Behold how far off
thou art yet from true charity and humility: which knows not how to be
angry or indignant, with any except one's self.'

Night fell. The long, illuminated train roared and flashed on its
invisible way under a dome of stars. It shrieked by mysterious stations,
dragging furiously its freight of luxury and light and human masks
through placid and humble villages and towns, of which it ignored
everything save their coloured signals of safety. Ages of oscillation
seemed to pass. In traversing the corridors one saw interior after
interior full of the signs of wearied humanity: magazines thrown aside,
rugs in disorder, hair dishevelled, eyes heavy, cheeks flushed, limbs in
the abandoned attitudes of fatigue--here and there a compartment with
blinds discreetly drawn, suggesting the jealous seclusion of love, and
here and there a group of animated tatlers or card-players whose nerves
nothing could affect, and who were incapable of lassitude; on every train
and every steamer a few such are to be found.

More ages passed, and yet the journey had but just begun. At length we
thundered and resounded through canyons of tall houses, their facades
occasionally bathed in the cold, blue radiance of arc-lights; and under
streets and over canals. Paris! the city of the joy of life! We were to
see the muddied skirts of that brilliant and sinister woman. We panted to
a standstill in the vast echoing cavern of the Gare du Nord, stared
haughtily and drowsily at its bustling confusion, and then drew back, to
carry our luxury and our correctness through the lowest industrial
quarters. Belleville, Menilmontant, and other names of like associations
we read on the miserable, forlorn stations of the Ceinture, past which we
trailed slowly our disgust.

We made a semicircle through the secret shames that beautiful Paris
would fain hide, and, emerging, found ourselves in the deserted and stony
magnificence of the Gare de Lyon, the gate of the South. Here, where we
were not out of keeping, where our splendour was of a piece with the
splendour of the proudest terminus in France, we rested long, fretted by
the inexplicable leisureliness on the part of a _train de grand luxe_,
while gilded officials paced to and fro beneath us on the platforms,
guarding in their bureaucratic breasts the secret of the exact instant at
which the great express would leave. I slept, and dreamed that the Misses
Vicar