It was this
figure that her husband saw when, having reached the polished Sphinx,
having entangled himself with a man selling picture postcards, he
turned; the stanza instantly stopped. He came up to her, laid his hand
on her shoulder, and said, "Dearest." His voice was supplicating. But
she shut her face away from him, as much as to say, "You can't possibly
understand."
As he did not leave her, however, she had to wipe her eyes, and to raise
them to the level of the factory chimneys on the other bank. She saw
also the arches of Waterloo Bridge and the carts moving across them,
like the line of animals in a shooting gallery. They were seen blankly,
but to see anything was of course to end her weeping and begin to walk.
"I would rather walk," she said, her husband having hailed a cab already
occupied by two city men.
The fixity of her mood was broken by the action of walking. The shooting
motor cars, more like spiders in the moon than terrestrial objects, the
thundering drays, the jingling hansoms, and little black broughams,
made her think of the world she lived in. Somewhere up there above the
pinnacles where the smoke rose in a pointed hill, her children were
now asking for her, and getting a soothing reply. As for the mass of
streets, squares, and public buildings which parted them, she only felt
at this moment how little London had done to make her love it, although
thirty of her forty years had been spent in a street.
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