Lord Arthur felt curiously affected, he could not tell why. There
was something in the dawn's delicate loveliness that seemed to him
inexpressibly pathetic, and he thought of all the days that break in
beauty, and that set in storm. These rustics, too, with their rough,
good-humoured voices, and their nonchalant ways, what a strange London
they saw! A London free from the sin of night and the smoke of day, a
pallid, ghost-like city, a desolate town of tombs! He wondered what they
thought of it, and whether they knew anything of its splendour and its
shame, of its fierce, fiery-coloured joys, and its horrible hunger, of
all it makes and mars from morn to eve. Probably it was to them merely a
mart where they brought their fruits to sell, and where they tarried for
a few hours at most, leaving the streets still silent, the houses still
asleep. It gave him pleasure to watch them as they went by. Rude as
they were, with their heavy, hob-nailed shoes, and their awkward gait,
they brought a little of a ready with them.
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