For some time they kept to the pavements from force of habit.
“I say, Mill, don’t you feel adventurous?” asked Blanche.
Millie looked dissatisfied. “It’s so lonely, B.,” was her expression of feeling.
“Never had London all to myself before,” said Blanche.
Near Hammersmith Broadway they saw a tram standing on the rails. Its thin tentacle still clung to the overhead wire that had once given it life, as if it waited there patiently hoping for a renewal of the exhilarating current.
Almost unconsciously Blanche and Millie quickened their pace. Perhaps this was the outermost dying ripple of life, the furthest outpost of the new activity that was springing up in central London.
But the tram was guarded by something that in the hot, still air seemed to surround it with an almost visible mist.
“Eugh!” ejaculated Millie and shrank back. “Don’t go, Blanche. It’s awful!”
Blanche’s hand also had leapt to her face, but she took a few steps forward and peered into the sunlit case of steel and glass. She saw a heap of clothes about the framework of a grotesquely jointed scarecrow, and the gleam of something round, smooth and white.
She screamed faintly, and a filthy dog crept, with a thin yelp, from under the seat and came to the door of the tram. For a moment it stood there with an air that was half placatory, wrinkling its nose and feebly raising a stump of propitiatory tail, then, with another protesting yelp, it crept back, furtive and ashamed, to its unlawful meat.