Whether it was the reaction, or the effect of the glass of stout, was never known, but after passing Cannon Street Mrs. Rosamond began to feel drowsy and dreamy, imagining she was nearing home in the local train, and wondering if her husband had received her telegram, and would come to meet her. She fell asleep, and a lovely picture she made, with lips slightly parted, and her long, curved eyelashes resting, like a child’s, on her soft cheeks. There was revealed just a few inches of well-fitting black silk clocked stockings, neatly-turned ankles, and a charming pair of very small dark tan shoes. Time sped on, and, with it, the Circle train, past Bishopsgate, Farringdon Street, and King’s Cross, with its maze of metropolitan underground lines; through dismal tunnels, black with smoke; through brick-lined cuttings, foul with sooty deposit; past stations, each one hung, by way of adornment, with the same monotonous, highly-coloured “works of art,” drawing attention to Colman’s Mustard, Reckitt’s Blue, Nestle’s Milk, Bovril, Oxo, Lemco, Globe Polish, Ogden’s Cigarettes, Bird’s Custards, and Stephen’s Inks, and provided with penny-in-the-slot machines, with bookstalls bearing a strong family likeness, and with here and there a refreshment bar, where buns and sandwiches of the Mugby Junction type might be had. At High Street, Kensington, where the engine was changed, the guard looked in, admired the sleeping beauty, and discreetly withdrew in silence. In the middle of the tunnel between Sloane Square and Victoria, the train pulled up with a jerk, the signal having been suddenly put against it. Mrs. Rosamond woke, and looking at her watch, found that she must have been slumbering nearly an hour, and a fellow-passenger told her that by the time the train reached the Mansion House Station she would have completely traversed the circle of the Underground! “Well, I _will_ see this matter through,” she said to herself, “and I will not go again into that horrid Bank Subway. After all, I shall soon be at Bishopsgate Street.” So she went on. How, on her arrival there, she escaped having to pay the full fare, no one knows. She kept her own counsel; but the ticket collector and the guard probably thought she was too nice to be worried with interrogations. Her brief impressions of the Underground were that only in a few respects was the Tube an improvement upon it. The Inner Circle Trains, she thought, ran more smoothly; there was less rocking of the carriages, and less rattling noise; but they were badly lighted; the banging of doors was awful; the atmosphere sulphurous and stifling; and carriages, stations, staircases, and tunnels looked as if they had not been cleaned for months. Worse than all was the mode of pulling up the train with a jerk, which, at each stopping-place, almost invariably threw the alighting passengers into their fellow-travellers’ laps.