"No, that is just what it is not. The last one was thin, this one is fat; the last one was tall, this one is tiny. The last one was stupid, this one is witty. Some men seek the source of the Nile, I the lace of a bodice. A new love is a voyage of discovery. What is her furniture like? What will she say? What are her opinions of love? But when you have been a woman's lover a month you know her morally and physically. Society is based on the family. The family alone survives, it floats like an ark over every raging flood. But you may understand without being able to accept, and I cannot accept, although I understand and love family life. What promiscuity of body and mind! The idea of never being alone fills me with horror to lose that secret self, which, like a shy bird, flies out of sight in the day, but is with you, oh, how intensely in the morning!" "Nothing pleases you so much as to be allowed to talk nonsense about yourself." Mike laughed. "Let me have those opera-glasses. That woman sitting on the bench is like her." The trees of the embankment waved along the laughing water, and in scores the sparrows flitted across the sleek green sward. The porter in his bright uniform, cocked hat, and brass buttons, explained the way out to a woman. Her child wore a red sash and stooped to play with a cat that came along the railings, its tail high in the air. "They know nothing of Lily Young," Mike said to himself; and knowing the porter could not interfere, he wondered what he would think if he knew all. "If she comes nothing can save her, she must and shall be mine." Waterloo Bridge stood high above the river, level and lovely. Over Charing Cross the brightness was full of spires and pinnacles, but Southwark shore was lost in flat dimness. Then the sun glowed and Westminster ascended tall and romantic, St. Thomas's and St. John's floating in pale enchantment, and beneath the haze that heaved and drifted, revealing coal-barges moored by the Southwark shore, lay a sheet of gold. The candour of the morning laughed upon the river; and there came a little steamer into the dazzling water, her smoke heeling over, coiling and uncoiling like a snake, and casting tremendous shadow--in her train a line of boats laden to the edge with deal planks. Then the haze heaved and London disappeared, became again a gray city, faint and far away--faint as spires seem in a dream. Again and again the haze wreathed and went out, discovering wharfs and gold inscriptions, uncovering barges aground upon the purple slime of the Southwark shore, their yellow yards pointing like birds with outstretched necks.