It struck him that auburn, with orange lights in the sunlight, was the colour of heat, the colour of heaven, the colour of life and love. He looked round at the characteristic London female passer-by, the thin-breasted girl, with hair the colour of wet sand, and reflected that Woman is a much rarer creature than she appears to be. He recovered consciousness in Kensington Gardens at dusk. He remembered that he was a merry vagabond. “Tra-la-la ...” he sang as he passed a park-keeper. People in authority seem as a rule to be shy of the pose. The park-keeper was not exactly shy, but he made a murmured protest against the Tra-la-la, and saw the gardener to the gate with most offensive care. In theory the gardener spent the night at the Ritz. In practice he slept on the Embankment. He was a man of luck in little things, and the night was the first fine night for several weeks. The gardener followed the moon in its light fall across the sky. Several little stars followed it too, in and out of the small smiling clouds. The moon threaded its way in and out of the gardener’s small smiling dreams. Oh mad moon, you porthole, looking up into a fantastic Paradise! The gardener did not dream of red hair. That subject was exhausted. When an undecided sun blinked through smoked glasses at the Thames, and at the little steamers sleeping with their funnels down like sea-gulls on the water with their heads under their wings, the gardener rose. He had a bath and a shave—in theory—and walked southward. Tra-la-la. He walked very fast when he got beyond the tramways, but after a while a woman who was walking behind him caught him up. Women are apt to get above themselves in these days, I think. “I’m going to walk with you,” said the woman. “Why?” asked the gardener, who spent some ingenuity in saying the thing that was unexpected, whether possible or impossible. “Because you’re carrying that flower-pot,” replied the woman. “It’s such absurd sort of luggage to be taking on a journey.” “How do you know I’m going on a journey?” asked the gardener, astonished at meeting his match. “By the expression of your heels.” The gardener could think of nothing more apt to say than “Tra-la-la ...” so he said it, to let her know that he was a merry vagabond. The woman was quite plain, and therefore worthy only of invisibility in the eyes of a self-respecting young man. She had the sort of hair that plays truant over the ears, but has not vitality enough to do it prettily. Her complexion was not worthy of the name. Her eyes made no attempt to redeem her plainness, which is the only point of having eyes in fiction. Her only outward virtue was that she did not attempt to dress as if she were pretty. And even this is not a very attractive virtue. She carried a mustard-coloured portmanteau. “I know what you are,” said the gardener. “You are a suffragette, going to burn a house down.” The woman raised her eyebrows.