reproaching him.

It so happened that, on this same return journey, he occupied the seat on
the right, immediately behind that of the driver. The sky was covered,
the atmosphere close. The horses, grey ones, showed a thick yellowish
lather where the collar rubbed their necks and the traces their flanks.
They were slack and heavy, and the omnibus hugged the curb. Within it was
empty, and on the top boasted but three passengers besides Iglesias
himself. It followed that, carrying insufficiency of ballast, the great
red-painted vehicle lumbered, and jerked, and swayed uneasily; while the
lighter traffic swept past it in a glittering stream, the dominant note
of which was black as against the dirty drab of the recently watered
wood-pavement. And the character of that traffic was new to Dominic
Iglesias, though he had travelled the Hammersmith Road, Kensington High
Street and Kensington Gore, Knightsbridge and Piccadilly, back and forth
daily, these many years. For the exigencies of business demanding that
the hours of his journeying should be early and late, always the same, it
came about that the aspect of these actually so-familiar thoroughfares
was novel, as beheld in the height of the season at three o'clock in the
afternoon.

At first Iglesias saw without seeing, busy with his own uncheerful
thoughts. But after a while he began to speculate idly on the scene
around him, turning to the outward and material for distraction, if not
for actual comfort. And so the stream of carriages and hansoms, and the
conspicuously well-favoured human beings occupying them, began to
intrigue his attention. He questioned whom they might be and whither
wending, decked forth in such brave array. They seemed to suggest
something divorced from, yet native to, his experience; something he had
never touched in fact, yet the right to which was resident in his blood.