As she sat deeply sunk in the luxurious first-class seat, her little feet could not reach the floor, and the effort with which she bent forward was heroic. The very pretty girl in the corner at her elbow was almost eclipsed by her breadth and thickness; and the old gentleman in the opposite corner spoke a word now and then, but for the most part silently smelled of tobacco. The talk which the mother and future son-in-law had to themselves, though it was so intimately of their own affairs, we fancied more or less carried on at us. I do not know why they should have wished to crush us with their opulence since they would not have chosen to enrich us; but I have never had so great a sense of opulence. They were all, as I said, singularly handsome people, in the dark, liquid, lustrous fashion which I am afraid our own race can never achieve. Yet with all this evident opulence, with their resolute spirits, with their satisfaction in having spent so much on a luncheon which they could have made less expensive if they had not chosen to gratify themselves in it, with their prospect of a four-guinea box, opposite the box of royalty, at the opera, it seemed to me they were rather pathetic than otherwise. But I am sure they would have never imagined themselves so, and that in their own eyes they were a radiantly enviable party returning from a brilliant day at Henley. XVII AMERICAN ORIGINS--MOSTLY NORTHERN The return in mid-September to the London which we left at the end of July, implicates a dramatic effect more striking than any possible in the mere tourist's experience. In the difference between this London and that you fully realize the moral and physical magnitude of the season. The earlier London throbbed to bursting with the tide of manifold life, the later London lies gaunt, hollow, flaccid, and as if spent by the mere sense of what it has been through. The change is almost incredible, and the like of it is nowhere to be witnessed with us. It seems a sort of bluff to say that a city which still holds all its six millions except a few hundred thousands, is empty, but that is the look a certain part of London has in September, for the brilliant and perpetual movement of those hundred thousands was what gave it repletion.