e."

"The Pump in Neville's Row, for example?" enquired Mr. Pepper.

"Precisely," said Ambrose.

Each of the ladies, being after the fashion of their sex, highly trained
in promoting men's talk without listening to it, could think--about the
education of children, about the use of fog sirens in an opera--without
betraying herself. Only it struck Helen that Rachel was perhaps too
still for a hostess, and that she might have done something with her
hands.

"Perhaps--?" she said at length, upon which they rose and left, vaguely
to the surprise of the gentlemen, who had either thought them attentive
or had forgotten their presence.

"Ah, one could tell strange stories of the old days," they heard Ridley
say, as he sank into his chair again. Glancing back, at the doorway,
they saw Mr. Pepper as though he had suddenly loosened his clothes, and
had become a vivacious and malicious old ape.

Winding veils round their heads, the women walked on deck. They were
now moving steadily down the river, passing the dark shapes of ships
at anchor, and London was a swarm of lights with a pale yellow canopy
drooping above it. There were the lights of the great theatres, the
lights of the long streets, lights that indicated huge squares of
domestic comfort, lights that hung high in air. No darkness would
ever settle upon those lamps, as no darkness had settled upon them for
hundreds of years. It seemed dreadful that the town should blaze
for ever in the same spot; dreadful at least to people going away to
adventure upon the sea, and beholding it as a circumscribed mound,
eternally burnt, eternally scarred. From the deck of the ship the great
city appeared a crouched and cowardly figure, a sedentary miser.

Leaning over the rail, side by side, Helen said, "Won't you be cold?"
Rachel replied, "No. . . . How beautiful!" she added a moment later.
Very little was visible--a few masts, a shadow of land here, a line of
brilliant windows there. They tried to make head against the wind.

"It blows--it blows!" gasped Rachel, the words rammed down her throat.
Struggling by her side, Helen was suddenly overcome by the spirit of
movement, and pushed along with her skirts wrapping themselves round
her knees, and both arms to her hair. But slowly the intoxication of
movement died down, and the wind became rough and chilly. They looked
through a chink in the blind and saw that long cigars were being smoked
in the dining-room; they saw Mr. Ambrose