Sustained entirely upon picture post cards for the past two months, Fanny’s idea of Jacob was more statuesque, noble, and eyeless than ever.  To reinforce her vision she had taken to visiting the British Museum, where, keeping her eyes downcast until she was alongside of the battered Ulysses, she opened them and got a fresh shock of Jacob’s presence, enough to last her half a day.  But this was wearing thin.  And she wrote now—­poems, letters that were never posted, saw his face in advertisements on hoardings, and would cross the road to let the barrel-organ turn her musings to rhapsody.  But at breakfast (she shared rooms with a teacher), when the butter was smeared about the plate, and the prongs of the forks were clotted with old egg yolk, she revised these visions violently; was, in truth, very cross; was losing her complexion, as Margery Jackson told her, bringing the whole thing down (as she laced her stout boots) to a level of mother-wit, vulgarity, and sentiment, for she had loved too; and been a fool.

“One’s godmothers ought to have told one,” said Fanny, looking in at the window of Bacon, the mapseller, in the Strand—­told one that it is no use making a fuss; this is life, they should have said, as Fanny said it now, looking at the large yellow globe marked with steamship lines.

“This is life.  This is life,” said Fanny.

“A very hard face,” thought Miss Barrett, on the other side of the glass, buying maps of the Syrian desert and waiting impatiently to be served.  “Girls look old so soon nowadays.”

The equator swam behind tears.

“Piccadilly?” Fanny asked the conductor of the omnibus, and climbed to the top.  After all, he would, he must, come back to her.

But Jacob might have been thinking of Rome; of architecture; of jurisprudence; as he sat under the plane tree in Hyde Park.

The omnibus stopped outside Charing Cross; and behind it were clogged omnibuses, vans, motor-cars, for a procession with banners was passing down Whitehall, and elderly people were stiffly descending from between the paws of the slippery lions, where they had been testifying to their faith, singing lustily, raising their eyes from their music to look into the sky, and still their eyes were on the sky as they marched behind the gold letters of their creed.

The traffic stopped, and the sun, no longer sprayed out by the breeze, became almost too hot.  But the procession passed; the banners glittered —­far away down Whitehall; the traffic was released; lurched on; spun to a smooth continuous uproar; swerving round the curve of Cockspur Street; and sweeping past Government offices and equestrian statues down Whitehall to the prickly spires, the tethered grey fleet of masonry, and the large white clock of Westminster.