"It's like that with us Londoners, too," Hilda was saying. "Everything
is awfully grim and cheerless, our weather and our houses and our ways
of amusing ourselves. But we can be happier than anybody. We can go mad
with joy, as the people do out in the fields on a fine Whitsunday. We
make the most of our moment."
She thrust her little chin out defiantly over her gray fur collar, and
Bartley looked down at her and laughed.
"You are a plucky one, you." He patted her glove with his hand. "Yes,
you are a plucky one."
Hilda sighed. "No, I'm not. Not about some things, at any rate. It
doesn't take pluck to fight for one's moment, but it takes pluck to go
without--a lot. More than I have. I can't help it," she added fiercely.
After miles of outlying streets and little gloomy houses, they reached
London itself, red and roaring and murky, with a thick dampness coming
up from the river, that betokened fog again to-morrow. The streets were
full of people who had worked indoors all through the priceless day and
had now come hungrily out to drink the muddy lees of it. They stood
in long black lines, waiting before the pit entrances of the
theatres--short-coated boys, and girls in sailor hats, all shivering
and chatting gayly. There was a blurred rhythm in all the dull city
noises--in the clatter of the cab horses and the rumbling of the busses,
in the street calls, and in the undulating tramp, tramp of the crowd. It
was like the deep vibration of some vast underground machinery, and like
the muffled pulsations of millions of human hearts.
Pages:
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78