looking upon. She saw the valley with different eyes: she saw it now with a
woman's eyes; before she had seen it with a child's eyes. She remembered
the ruined collieries and the black cinder-heaps protruding through the
hillside on which she was now standing. In childhood, these ruins were
convenient places to play hide-and-seek in. But now they seemed to convey a
meaning to her mind, a meaning that was not very clear, that perplexed her,
that she tried to put aside and yet could not. At her left, some fifty feet
below, running in the shape of a fan, round a belt of green, were the roofs
of Northwood--black brick unrelieved except by the yellow chimney-pots,
specks of colour upon a line of soft cotton-like clouds melting into grey,
the grey passing into blue, and the blue spaces widening. 'It will be a hot
day,' she said to herself, and fell to thinking that a hot day was hotter
on this hillside than elsewhere. At every moment the light grew more and
more intense, till a distant church spire faded almost out of sight, and
she was glad she had come up here to admire the view from the top of Market
Street. Southwark, on the right, as black as Northwood, toppled into the
valley in irregular lines, the jaded houses seeming in Kate's fancy like
cart-loads of gigantic pill-boxes cast in a hurry from the counter along
the floor. It amused her to stand gazing, contrasting the reality with her
memories. It seemed to her that Southwark had never before been so plain to
the eye. She could follow the lines of the pavement and almost distinguish
the men from the women passing. A hansom appeared and disappeared, the
white horse seen now against the green blinds of a semi-detached villa and
shown a moment after against the yellow rotundities of a group of pottery
ovens.

The sun was now rapidly approaching the meridian, and in the vibrating
light the wheels of the most distant collieries could almost be counted,
and the stems of the far-off factory chimneys appeared like tiny fingers.