We walk on, our talk suspended, past a ruthlessly clumsy hoarding, towards where men and women and children are struggling about a string of omnibuses. A newsvendor at the corner spreads a newspaper placard upon the wood pavement, pins the corners down with stones, and we glimpse something about:—

MASSACRE IN ODESSA.

DISCOVERY OF HUMAN REMAINS AT CHERTSEY.

SHOCKING LYNCHING OUTRAGE IN NEW YORK STATE.

GERMAN INTRIGUES GET A SET-BACK.

THE BIRTHDAY HONOURS. — FULL LIST.

Dear old familiar world!

An angry parent in conversation with a sympathetic friend jostles against us. “I’ll knock his blooming young ‘ed orf if ‘e cheeks me again. It’s these ’ere brasted Board Schools ——”

An omnibus passes, bearing on a board beneath an incorrectly drawn union Jack an exhortation to the true patriot to “Buy Bumper’s British-Boiled Jam.” . . .

I am stunned beyond the possibility of discussion for a space. In this very place it must have been that the high terrace ran with the gardens below it, along which I came from my double to our hotel. I am going back, but now through reality, along the path I passed so happily in my dream. And the people I saw then are the people I am looking at now — with a difference.

The botanist walks beside me, white and nervously jerky in his movements, his ultimatum delivered.

We start to cross the road. An open carriage drives by, and we see a jaded, red-haired woman, smeared with paint, dressed in furs, and petulantly discontented. Her face is familiar to me, her face, with a difference.

Why do I think of her as dressed in green?

Of course! — she it was I saw leading her children by the hand!

Comes a crash to our left, and a running of people to see a cab-horse down on the slippery, slanting pavement outside St. Martin’s Church.

We go on up the street.

A heavy-eyed young Jewess, a draggled prostitute — no crimson flower for her hair, poor girl! — regards us with a momentary speculation, and we get a whiff of foul language from two newsboys on the kerb.

“We can’t go on talking,” the botanist begins, and ducks aside just in time to save his eye from the ferule of a stupidly held umbrella. He is going to treat our little tiff about that lady as closed. He has the air of picking up our conversation again at some earlier point.

He steps into the gutter, walks round outside a negro hawker, just escapes the wheel of a hansom, and comes to my side again.

“We can’t go on talking of your Utopia,” he says, “in a noise and crowd like this.”

We are separated by a portly man going in the opposite direction, and join again............