“What does the beauty of beauties want of _our_ poor plain lady? She has a totally different stamp. I don’t know much about women, but I can see that.” “Where do you see a different stamp? They both have the stamp of their rank!” cried Rosy. “Who can ever tell what women want, at any time?” Hyacinth asked with the off-handedness of a man of the world. “Well, my boy, if you don’t know any more than I you disappoint me! Perhaps if we wait long enough she’ll tell us some day herself.” “Tell you what she wants of Lady Aurora?” “I don’t mind about Lady Aurora so much; but what in the name of long journeys she wants with _us_!” “Don’t you think you’re worth a long journey?” Rosy cried gaily. “If you weren’t my brother, which is handy for seeing you, and I weren’t confined to my sofa, I’d go from one end of England to the other to make your acquaintance! He’s in love with the Princess,” she went on to Hyacinth, “and he asks those senseless questions to cover it up. What does any one want of anything?” It was decided at last that the two young men should go down to Greenwich, and after they had partaken of bread and cheese with Rosy they embarked on a penny steamer. The boat was densely crowded, and they leaned, rather squeezed together, in the fore part of it, against the rail of the deck, and watched the big black fringe of the yellow stream. The river had always for Hyacinth a deep beguilement. The ambiguous appeal he had felt as a child in all the aspects of London came back to him from the dark detail of its banks and the sordid agitation of its bosom: the great arches and pillars of the bridges, where the water rushed and the funnels tipped and sounds made an echo and there seemed an overhanging of interminable processions; the miles of ugly wharves and warehouses; the lean protrusions of chimney, mast and crane; the painted signs of grimy industries staring from shore to shore; the strange, flat, obstructive barges, straining and bumping on some business as to which everything was vague but that it was remarkably dirty; the clumsy coasters and colliers which thickened as one went down; the small loafing boats whose occupants, somehow, looking up from their oars at the steamer, as they rocked in the oily undulations of its wake, appeared profane and sarcastic; in short all the grinding, puffing, smoking, splashing activity of the turbid flood. In the good-natured crowd, amid the fumes of vile tobacco, beneath the shower of sooty particles and to the accompaniment of the bagpipe of a dingy Highlander who sketched occasionally an unconvincing reel, Hyacinth forbore to speak to his companion of what he had most at heart; but later, as they lay in the brown, crushed grass on one of the slopes of Greenwich Park and saw the river stretch away and shine beyond the pompous colonnades of the Hospital, he asked him if there were any truth in what Rosy had said about his being sweet on their friend the Princess.