There was a self-satisfaction in the clatter of the horses' hoofs as the cabs made their way from the cemetery, an indication that having achieved their part of the day's burden satisfactorily, it was left to the humans they were carrying away to dismiss them as soon as decorum permitted. The drizzle persisted still. The tram-lines glistened evilly mottled among the bricks. With fitful abstraction Philip looked through the window into the drab day. The continuity of houses had not yet begun. Here and there stood a public house at a corner, or two or three houses thrown up in apologetic haste. The cabs overtook a man and a woman walking citywards in the same direction; it seemed that when the hearse came abreast of the man, a natural impulse made him remove his hat. The man stood gaping as the first cab approached, the woman staring curiously. Then suddenly she seized him by the shoulder and pointed a correcting finger towards the procession. She shouted something into his ears--the actual words were drowned in the rattle of wheels. The man gaped more foolishly, and at once, deliberately, replaced his hat. As the man and woman passed from Philip's sight, they were grinning significantly into each other's faces. The lad wondered what it meant. Quickly he was informed. The procession was now riding abreast of a piece of waste ground, sloping greasily up from the roadside level. Against the sky-line, faintly muffled by the intervening rain, Philip saw three or four youths standing, long-legged. He perceived that as soon as they became conscious of the funeral procession their lank immobility had stiffened, and that at once they proceeded to make derisive gestures with their arms and hands. When at last he realized the significance of their gestures he felt as though each had plunged a rusty knife into him. It was the movement he remembered on the part of a band of youths who two or three years ago had assembled outside the _Polisher Shool_ to mock the old Jews entering on their _Yom Kippur_ supplications. It was the movement which had sometimes greeted him in the meaner Gentile parts of Doomington, to an accompaniment of "smoggy van Jew!" Once Higson Junior had stood at the top of the stairs ... The rain was not too opaque to obscure their lips shaping, nor so dense that he could not hear the scornful implacable words--"Smogs! Look at the smoggy van Jews!" "God!" he shouted, suddenly starting to his feet. The others calmed him, bade him sit down; to them it seemed a spasmodic outburst of his grief. They had not noticed the gesticulating youths on the clay slope. Or perhaps the youths had not escaped their notice, but having passed this way before, the edge of the experience had been blunted for them by familiarity.