It so happened that, on this same return journey, he occupied the seat on the right, immediately behind that of the driver. The sky was covered, the atmosphere close. The horses, grey ones, showed a thick yellowish lather where the collar rubbed their necks and the traces their flanks. They were slack and heavy, and the omnibus hugged the curb. Within it was empty, and on the top boasted but three passengers besides Iglesias himself. It followed that, carrying insufficiency of ballast, the great red-painted vehicle lumbered, and jerked, and swayed uneasily; while the lighter traffic swept past it in a glittering stream, the dominant note of which was black as against the dirty drab of the recently watered wood-pavement. And the character of that traffic was new to Dominic Iglesias, though he had travelled the Hammersmith Road, Kensington High Street and Kensington Gore, Knightsbridge and Piccadilly, back and forth daily, these many years. For the exigencies of business demanding that the hours of his journeying should be early and late, always the same, it came about that the aspect of these actually so-familiar thoroughfares was novel, as beheld in the height of the season at three o'clock in the afternoon. At first Iglesias saw without seeing, busy with his own uncheerful thoughts. But after a while he began to speculate idly on the scene around him, turning to the outward and material for distraction, if not for actual comfort. And so the stream of carriages and hansoms, and the conspicuously well-favoured human beings occupying them, began to intrigue his attention. He questioned whom they might be and whither wending, decked forth in such brave array. They seemed to suggest something divorced from, yet native to, his experience; something he had never touched in fact, yet the right to which was resident in his blood. And with this he ceased, in instinct, to be merely the highly respected and respectable head clerk of Messrs. Barking Brothers & Barking--now superannuated and laid on the shelf. A gayer, fiercer, simpler life, quick with violences of vivacious sound and vivid colour, the excitement of it heightened by clear shining southern sunshine and blue-black shadow--a life undreamed of by conventional, slow-moving, rather vulgar middle-class London--to which, on the face of it, he appeared as emphatically to belong--awoke and cried in Dominic Iglesias. It was a surprising little experience, causing him to straighten up his lean yet shapely figure; while the burden of his years, and the long monotony of them, seemed strangely lifted off him. Then, with the air of courtly reserve--at once the joke and envy of the younger clerks, which had earned him the nickname of "the old Hidalgo"--he leaned forward and addressed the omnibus driver. The latter upraised a broad, moist and sleepy countenance.