Wenny said nothing. The street was muffled by the fog all about them. In Fanshaw's mind were phrases from Lamb, vague thought of fogs over London. They came out on the springy boards of the bridge that seemed to sway ever so little under their feet. The fog above the river was denser and colder. Their steps were loud on the slats of the sidewalk. Half way over they passed a man and a girl, bodies cleaving together so that they made a single silhouette. Fanshaw caught Wenny's backward glance after them. Rather unhealthy, the interest in those things, he thought. Further along they heard a regular heavy tread coming towards them, a policeman. "He'll break their clinch," said Wenny giggling. Fanshaw was annoyed,--vulgar, he thought, why notice such things? Other ages perhaps had put beauty, romance in them; Paolo and Francesca floating cloudy through limbo. "These last few days I have been often thinking of that passage, Pico della Mirandola riding into Florence in the time of lilies. Then it would have been less futile to be alive." "How do you know Fanshaw?" "You have no nostalgia of the past, have you, Wenny? It's that things were so much cleaner, fresher. Everything was not so muddled and sordid then." "Can't things always have been muddled and sordid? I think they were." "Those people on the bridge and you giggling at them. I can't understand it, it's so low." "Then, by God, you can't understand anything." Wenny's voice broke; he was angry and walked faster. Fanshaw thought of a phrase out of The Book of Tea; a man without tea was a man without poise, refinement. Wenny had no tea. How amusing his rages were. They went along without speaking. In the bright circle of each arclight he glanced at Wenny's sullen face, the prominent lips, the strangely soft-textured cheeks, the slightness of the waist under the shirt that bagged at the belt revealed by the flapping unbuttoned coat, the clenched swinging hands. There were puddles in the road. It was dark between arclights, a few glows from windows loomed distant among weighty shadows. Shadows seemed to move slouchingly just out of sight. Fanshaw felt he was walking unawares through all manner of lives, complications of events. Thought of holdups brought a vague fear into his mind. There ought to be more lights. If it weren't for these wretched Irish politicians who ran things.... When they crossed the railway tracks there were little red and green lights in the fog, the wail of an engine far away. A bell began to ring and the old man dozing in a little shack with a red and a green flag propped against his knees--like Rembrandt the shadows thought Fanshaw--jumped up. The bar came down behind them. Lights flashed down the track and they could hear down towards Cambridgeport the chug of a locomotive and the slow bumping of the wheels of freightcars over a crossing. "Let's stop and watch it go past," said Wenny. "No, my feet are wet. I'm afraid of catching cold." They walked on.