As they rumbled up Baker Street, she wondered impatiently why Miss Szigmondy had not appointed a meeting place in the West end. Baker Street began all right; one felt safe going up Orchard Street, past the beautiful china shop and the Romish richness of Burns and Oates, seeing the sequestered worldliness of Granville Place and rolling through Portman Square with its enormous grey houses masking hidden wealth; but after that it became a dismal corridor retreating towards the full chill of the north. If they had met in Piccadilly they could have driven straight down through heaven into Chelsea. Perhaps it would not be heaven with Miss Szigmondy. She would not know the difference in the feeling of the different parts of London. She would drive along like a foreigner--or a member of a provincial antiquarian society, "intelligently" noticing things, knowing about the buildings and the statues. Londoners were always twitted with not knowing about London ... the reason why they jested about it, half proudly, was their consciousness of being Londoners, living in London, going about happy, the minute they were outside their houses, looking at nothing and feeling everything, like people wandering happily from room to room in a well known house at some time when everybody's attention was turned away by a festival or a catastrophe.... London was like a prairie. In a hansom it would be heaven, with anybody. A hansom saved you from your companion more than any other vehicle. You were as much outside it in London as you were inside with your companion, if you were anywhere south of Marylebone ... the way the open hood framed the vista.... 3 There was a hansom waiting outside Miss Szigmondy's garden gate. The afternoon would begin at once with a swift drive back into the world. Miss Szigmondy met her in the dark hall, with an outbreak of bright guttural talk, talking as she collected her things, breaking in with shouted instructions to an invisible servant. Her voice sounded very foreign in the excited upper notes, but it rang, a thin wiry ring, not shrieking and breaking like the voices of excited Englishwomen, perhaps that was "voice production." In the cab she sat sorting her cards, reading out names. Miriam thrilled as she heard them. Miss Szigmondy's attention was no longer on her. Her mind slipped easily back; the intervening time fell away. She was going with her sisters along past the Burlington Arcade, she saw the pillar box, the old man selling papers, the old woman with the crooked black sailor hat and the fringed shawl, sitting on a box behind her huge basket of tulips and daffodils ... the great grimed stone pillars, the court yard beyond them blazing with sunshine, the wide stone steps at the far end of the court yard leading up into cool shadow, the turnstile and great hall, an archway, and the sudden fresh blaze of colours.... * * * * *