oppressiveness I am aware of having vainly attempted to share with the
reader, and the street children seemed to have been roused to uncommon
vigilance by it. They played about far into the night, unrebuked by
their mothers, and the large babies, whom the little girls were always
lugging, shared their untimely wakefulness if not their activity. There
was seldom any crying among them then, though by day the voice of grief
and rage was often lifted above the shout of joy. If their mothers did
not call them in-doors, their fathers were still less exacting. After
the marketing, which took place in the neighboring avenue, where there
began to be a tremendous preparation for it in the afternoon, father and
mother alike seemed to have renounced their domestic cares and to have
liberated their offspring to the unrestricted enjoyment of the street.

As for drunkenness, I say again that I did not see much of it, and I
heard less, though that might have been because I did not look or listen
in the right places. With that, as with everything else in London, I
took my chance. Once I overheard the unseen transports of a lady in
Mayfair imaginably kept by the offices of mutual friends from assaulting
another lady. She, however, though she excelled in violence, did not
equal in persistence the injured gentleman who for a long, long hour
threatened an invisible bicyclist under our windows in that humbler
quarter already described as a poor relation of Belgravia. He had
apparently been almost run down by the hapless wheelman, who, in a
moment of fatuous truth, seemed to have owned that he had not sounded
the warning bell. In making this confession he had evidently apologized
with his forehead in the dust, and his victim had then evidently
forgiven him, though with a severe admonition for the future.
Imaginably, then, the bicyclist had remounted his wheel and attempted to
ride off, when he was stopped and brought back to the miserable error of
his confession. The whole ground was then gone over again, and again