A great thing is a sun helmet!
Then there was the lady of quality off to Monte Carlo, with trunks full of dresses, and one trunk lightly packed to contain more dresses which she will accumulate in Paris. There was a pale woman who had obviously been ordered South. Her husband stood beside the Pullman door telling her to take great care of herself and get well, and just before the train left he shyly, like a boy, gave her a little packet in white tissue paper, which she opened, and the tears came into her eyes as she held the small jeweller's box in her hand. Yes; there are such husbands!
All the time the cosy lamplit tables of the Pullman cars gradually filled. At one a man turned to the weather report, where under a weird map of barometric pressure he would read about the Channel crossing; at another a woman gazed thoughtfully through the menu wondering if it would be wise to eat a grilled sole.
* * *
Sharp to the last second of the minute the Continental boat express slipped out of Victoria with its load of people in search of health and pleasure. A flutter of handkerchiefs, a turn away, and the tail coach disappeared with those squat mail boxes on it which are lifted by a crane into the hold of the ship and lifted out in France, fixed on a railway wagon, and consigned to the G.P.O. in Paris.
As the boat express went off the diminishing grind of its wheels seemed to sing to me of olive yards and orange groves and long white roads in sunlight, and, somewhere far down in the south, a ship....
Romantic Mutton
Suppose you were walking down that delicious slope of Piccadilly, the Green Park rails on your left, and suddenly you saw Sir Claude, the wicked young squire, chucking a shepherdess under the chin while he slapped his riding boots with a hunting crop. Suppose...
This happens! Turn down Whitehorse Street, and in two seconds bald heads in club windows, pretty sandy-legged ladies, the flood stream of omnibuses, are forgotten. They have never existed. They are two hundred comfortable years off in the womb of Time. You stand in the eighteenth century, in a London of maypoles and gallantry and much sly sin, of coaches and cavalcades, inn parlours and buxom serving wenches. Even your spats feel elegant. You desire to snap an ivory snuffbox, to wave a fine cambric handkerchief, and to kiss a good-looking chambermaid. Odds truth, sir, you are under the influence of Shepherd Market! At any moment my Lord Maxbridge may turn the corner on the arm of Sir Timothy Strophe, poet and wit, and you will, of course, stand, leaning on your ebony cane, promising to look in at the Cocoa Tree to-night and to join my lord later (bow) at his box at Vauxhall. And did you hear what the Prince said last night of Lady T., and how young Charles H. took it? And did you know that Captain X. lost nine hundred guineas at cards on a single throw at White's, and that the Marquis de St. A. has sent his seconds to Lord M., and that Sir Richard T. has been black-balled at Brooks'? Gad, sir!