It was a wonderful time, so full of novelty and excitement for Brion that there was no room in him for brooding or apprehension; but, when they rode forth, his eyes were for twenty things at once, and least for his own company, who were in truth as safe and sober-sided a set of gravities as ever combined to make a prose of venturing. For which reason Brion soon forgot them for the livelier interests about him. He observed much, putting few questions to his companion--for that was not his way, except he had a definite purpose in asking--but measuring and marking in silence. The great buildings took him with wonder--and most, naturally, the congregated cluster of the Abbey, with its fair eastern chapel only then recently finished, and Margaret’s church, and the half-ruined royal palace and hall, approached through a gateway with octagonal towers which led into a mighty quadrangle with the river shining beyond. But more he liked to note the people, and the tumult and the multiformity of the crowds through which he passed. The jolly sellers at their booths (each hung over with its insignia, like the Cathedral stall of a knight-banneret), and their eternal chaunt of “What d’ye lack”; the ballad singers bawling their wares, and the loaded oyster-wenches dragging theirs; the gingerbread wife, the fiddler at a street corner--no commonplace of them all but figured as a very _lusus naturae_ to these young emancipated eyes. Once and again a knight in armour, with his scarf at his shoulder and a plume in his velvet cap, would come riding over the cobbles, scattering the crowd right and left; and that to Brion was the finest sight of all. But there was a funnier, which made him presently stare, and then go off into a fit of giggling which he tried vainly to repress. For suddenly he saw coming towards them the oddest figure of a woman he had ever seen. She was old and pinched and raddled, with a great ruff round her neck, and a high-crowned hat set askew on a wig as red as rhubarb. Her stomacher stuck a foot below her waist, supporting an oval frame, over which was draped a padded farthingale like a great swinging bell that ended at her ankles; and thence projected a pair of gilt and painted shanks, which were like nothing in the world so much as a couple of enormous marrow-bones. It was only on her near approach that Brion perceived these to be a sort of fantastic clogs, half a yard in height, which she wore to the soles of her embroidered slippers, over which they were strapped; but so little gravity did they afford to the poor body that she needed the prop of a walking cane on the one side, and on the other of a sweet ape of fashion in a French doublet, who was her cicisbeo, to hold her up; in despite of which buttresses, she had a hard ado to keep her equilibrium as she passed, smirking and ogling.