Julian could not
help smiling at the child's evident discomfiture as he pursued his way
towards Grosvenor Place. On one of the doorsteps of the big houses that
drive respect like a sharp nail into the hearts of the poor passers-by,
a ragged old woman was tumultuously squatting. Her gin-soddened face
came, like a scarlet cloud, to the view from the embrace of a vagabond
black bonnet, braided with rags, viciously glittering here and there
with the stray bugles which survived from some bygone era of comparative
respectability. Her penetrating snores denoted that she was oblivious
of the lounging approach of the policeman, whose blue and burly form
was visible in the extreme distance. Julian stopped to observe her
reflectively. His eye, which loved the grotesque, was pleased by the
bedragglement of her attitude, by the flat foot, in its bursting boot,
which protruded from the ocean of her mud-stained petticoats, by the
wisps of coarse hair wandering in the breeze above her brazen wrinkles.
Poor soul! she kept a diary of her deeds, even though she could perhaps
only make a mark where her signature should have been. Julian stared at
her very intently, and as he did so he started violently, for across the
human background which her sleeping dissipation supplied there seemed to
float the vague shadow, suggestion, call it what you will, of a tongue of
flame.
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