The streets in this mean quarter were deep in mud. The snow everywhere had
been trampled into liquid blackness, and the gaunt horses that galloped
along the wharfs dragging noisy vans and carts were splashed all over. It
might have been some sordid quarter of an Italian town that they drove
through, so oddly foreign were the disheveled houses, their predominant
color a heavy, glaring red. Men in white uniforms were shoveling snow from
the pavements. The many negro countenances in the hurrying crowds showed
blue tints in the bitter air. Coming suddenly to a wide, mean avenue, when
the carriage lurched and swayed on the street-car tracks, they heard,
mingled in an inconceivably ugly uproar, the crash and whine of the
cable-cars about them, and the thunder of the elevated-railway above their
heads.

Jack, sensitive to others' impressions, wondered if this tumultuous
ugliness made more dreary to Mrs. Upton the dreary circumstances of her
home-coming. There was no mitigation of dreariness to be hoped for from
Imogen, who was probably absorbed in her own bitter reflections. She gazed
steadily out of the window, replying only with quiet monosyllables to her
mother's tentative questions; her face keeping its look of endurance. One
could infer from it that had she not so controlled herself she must have
wept, and sitting before the mother and daughter Jack felt much awkwardness
in his position. If their meeting were not to be one with more conventional
surface he really ought not to have been invited to share it. Imogen, poor
darling, had all his sympathy; she hadn't reckoned with the difficulties;
she hadn't reckoned with that hurting smile, with the sharp reawakening of
the vicarious sense of wrong; but, all the same, before her look, her
silence, he could but feel for her mother, and feel, too, a keener
discomfort from the fact that his inopportune presence must make Mrs.
Upton's discomfort the greater.