There was an effect of discovered personality about the thing. This vehicle, which had hitherto been content to play a background part, a yellow patch amidst the scenery, was now revealing an individuality. It was purposeful and touched with a suggestion of playfulness, at once kindly and human; it had its thoughtful instants, its phases of quick decision, yet never once did it altogether lose a certain mellow dignity. There was nothing servile about it; never for a moment, for example, did it betray its blind obedience to gravitation. It was rather as if it and gravitation were going hand in hand. It came out into the road, butted into the bank, swept round, meditated for a full second, and then shafts foremost headed downhill, going quietly faster and faster and swaying from bank to bank. The shafts went before it like arms held out....
It had a quality—as if it were a favourite elephant running to a beloved master from whom it had been over-long separated. Or a slightly intoxicated and altogether happy yellow guinea-pig making for some coveted food....
At a considerable distance followed Professor Bowles, a miracle of compact energy, running so fast that he seemed only to touch the ground at very rare intervals....
And then, dispersedly, in their order and according to their natures, the others....
There was fortunately very little on the road.
There was a perambulator containing twins, whose little girl guardian was so fortunate as to be high up on the bank gathering blackberries.
A ditcher, ditching.
A hawker lost in thought.
His cart, drawn by a poor little black screw of a pony and loaded with the cheap flawed crockery that is so popular among the poor.
A dog asleep in the middle of the village street.... Amidst this choice of objects the caravan displayed a whimsical humanity. It reduced the children in the perambulator to tears, but passed. It might have reduced them to a sort of red-currant jelly. It lurched heavily towards the ditcher and spared him, it chased the hawker up the bank, it whipped off a wheel from the cart of crockery (which after an interval of astonishment fell like a vast objurgation) and then it directed its course with a grim intentness towards the dog.