Before her eyes the pageant of passions passed in endless array. Poverty and hypocrisy rubbed shoulders with ostentation, greed, and lust. Streets, crowded with a suffocating similarity of stodgy dwelling-places, gave way to parks, fragrant with the atmosphere of romance. Vice stalked unashamed through the thronged streets, and dull, tired faces, leaving monotony in their trail, passed their next of kin without a glance, those to whom discouragement had come as some incurable disease. Sinister, sensuous eyes looked into hers, and children pure in mind as snowflakes laughed as they walked beside their nurses. For the sun was in the heavens--and the same warmth that brings the beauty of a narcissus into being gives life to the noisome, crawling things that feed on decay. London's costume drama was at its height; uniformed men and girls paraded in their thousands. There were loose-limbed Colonials, slouchily-smart British Tommies, amazingly serious Americans; bus-girls, land-girls, girls on motor-cycles, and girls driving ambulances; graceful French officers, swarthy Italians, impassive Japanese, and ruddy-faced British sailors seeking a day's diversion from the sentry-go of the sea. From the great, throbbing city a babel of voices rose, like the sound from a gigantic mart; hurrying, restless vehicles worried their way through the maze of traffic; Youth with its carelessness of years elbowed Age, waiting with weakening tread the call of the Reaper to whom all men's lives are but sands that run their little course. Over the whole city brooded the Past. Take all the comedies of the centuries; gather the tragedies of history; piece them together with the fancies of a madman's brain--and what could they offer in the play of human emotions that would compare with one hour of London's life? They had gone a little way down Regent Street when an exclamation of delight escaped from the girl. "_Tiens!_" She caught the airman by the arm. "Papa Joffre!" A one-legged man with outstretched cap was seated on the pavement, and beside him were five colored drawings vaguely suggesting men of the times. "But he is wonderful," cried the girl. "See--it is Papa Joffre himself! Monsieur, you will give him a little present?" The airman presented the art-exhibitor with half-a-crown, receiving a gin-and-watery blessing in return, as they strolled on their way. "She's the fust one," muttered the cripple, preparing to close business for the day, "as 'as recognoized that there dial of Juff's this last four month. It were a rotten drawink and no mistike. Blime! I'll give that cove this 'arf-crown to draw me a picter of this 'ere General Fush as what is getting hisself talked abaht." He saw a shadow on the pavement and held out his cap. A Jewish rabbi, with sallow brow and spiritual face, passed without a glance, his flowing robes oddly reminiscent of the Levite in that Past to which the age of London is mere immaturity.