'You are becoming a responsibility,' she said smiling. 'I shall have to be a mother to you.' A faint smile came over his lips. 'A mother? After all, why not? Phedra. . . .' His eyes fixed on the grey morning sky as he followed his thought. The horse was trotting sharply. The winter air seemed to rush into their bodies. Jack, well wrapped up as he was in a fur coat, shrank back against the warm roundness of her shoulder. In an excess of gentleness she put her free hand in his. 'Dear boy,' she said softly bending over him. But there was no tenderness in Jack's blue eyes, rather lambent fire. At once his grasp on her hand tightened and his lips mutely formed into a request. Casting a glance right and left she kissed him quickly on the mouth. Up on the roof their bags jolted and bumped one another; milk carts were rattling their empty cans as they returned from their round; far away a drum and fife band played an acid air. They were going to Ventnor in pursuit of the blanketed sun; and Victoria rejoiced, as they passed through Piccadilly Circus where moisture settled black on the fountain, to think that for three days she would see the sun radiate, not loom as a red guinea. They passed over Waterloo Bridge at a foot pace; the enormous morning traffic was struggling in the neck of the bottle. The pressure was increased because the road was up between it and Waterloo Station. On her left, over the parapet, Victoria could see the immense desert of the Thames swathed in thin mist, whence emerged in places masts and where massive barges loomed passive like derelicts. She wondered for a moment whether her familiar symbol, the old vagrant, still sat crouching against the parapet at Westminster, watching rare puffs of smoke curling from his pipe into the cold air. The cab emerged from the crush, and to avoid it the cabman turned into the little black streets which line the wharf on the east side of the bridge, then doubled back towards Waterloo through Cornwall Road. There they met again the stream of drays and carts; the horse went at a foot pace, and Victoria gazed at the black rows of houses with the fear of a lost one. So uniformly ugly these apartment houses, with their dirty curtains, their unspeakable flowerpots in the parlour windows. Here and there cards announcing that they did pinking within; further, the board of a sweep; then a good corner house, the doctor's probably, with four steps and a brass knocker and a tall slim girl on her hands and knees washing the steps.