Christian bathed and dressed with his accustomed care. Before leaving the hotel they consulted a directory, and found the address of the boatman. They hired a cab. It was half-past four in the morning when their cab reached the hut beside the river bank. There was light in the windows. Crammon was still at a loss to comprehend. With the rusty bell-pull in his hand, his confused and questioning eyes sought Christian once more. But the latter paid no attention to his friend. A care-worn, under-nourished woman appeared at the door. Crammon was forced to speak, and, with inner vexation, said that they had come to ask after her daughter. The woman, who immediately imagined that her daughter had had secret affairs with rich gentlemen, stepped aside and let the two pass her. IV What Crammon saw and what Christian saw was not the same thing. Crammon saw a dimly lit room, with old chests of drawers that were smoke-stained, with a bed and the girl Katherine on it covered by the coarse, red-checked linen, with a cradle in which lay a whining baby. He saw clothes drying by the oven, the boatman sitting and eating potato soup, a bench on which a lad was sleeping, and many other unclean, ugly things. To Christian it was like a strange dream of falling. He, too, saw the boatman and the poor woman and the girl, whose glassy eyes and convulsed features brought home to him at once the reason for his visit. But he saw these things as one sees pictures while gliding down a shaft, pictures that recur at intervals, but are displaced by others that slip in between them. Thus he saw Eva Sorel feeding a walnut to one of her little monkeys. The boatman got up and took off his cap. And suddenly Christian saw Denis Lay and Lord Westmoreland giving each other their white-gloved hands. It was an insignificant thing; but his vision of it was glaring and incisive. Now the lad on the bench awakened, stretched himself, sat up with a start, and gave a sombre stare of astonishment at the strangers. The girl, ill from her horrible experience, turned her head away, and pulled the coverlet up to her chin. And suddenly Christian saw the charming vision of Letitia, playing at ball in the great room crossed by the gleams of lightning; and each thing that he saw had a relation to some other thing in that other world. The curiosity that had brought him hither still kept that unwonted smile on his face. But he looked helplessly at Crammon now, and he was sensitive to the indecency of his silent, stupid presence there, the purposelessness and folly of the whole nocturnal excursion. It seemed almost intolerable to him now to stay longer in this low-ceiled room, amid the odour of ill-washed bodies, and clothing that had been worn for years.