As I turn away, for the wind thrills and obliges me to walk rapidly, I
think how fortunate I am to experience these emotions in Hyde Park,
whereas my fellows have to go to Switzerland and to climb up Mont
Blanc, to feel half what I am feeling now, as I stand looking across
the level park watching the sunset, a dusky one. The last red bar of
light fades, and nothing remains but the grey park with the blue of
the suburb behind it, flowing away full of mist and people, dim and
mournful to the pallid lights of Kensington; and its crowds are like
strips of black tape scattered here and there. By the railings the
tape has been wound into a black ball, and, no doubt, the peg on which
it is wound is some preacher promising human nature deliverance from
evil if it will forego the spring time. But the spring time continues,
despite the preacher, over yonder, under branches swelling with leaf
and noisy with sparrows; the spring is there amid the boys and girls,
boys dressed in ill-fitting suits of broadcloth, daffodils in their
buttonholes; girls hardly less coarse, creatures made for work,
escaped for a while from the thraldom of the kitchen, now doing the
business of the world better than the preacher; poor servants of
sacred Spring. A woman in a close-fitting green cloth dress passes me
to meet a young man; a rich fur hangs from her shoulders; and they go
towards Park Lane, towards the wilful little houses with low balconies
and pendent flower-baskets swinging in the areas. Circumspect little
gardens! There is one, Greek as an eighteenth-century engraving, and
the woman in the close-fitting green cloth dress, rich fur hanging
from her shoulders, almost hiding the pleasant waist, enters one of
these. She is Park Lane. Park Lane supper parties and divorce are
written in her eyes and manner. The old beau, walking swiftly lest he
should catch cold, his moustache clearly dyed, his waist certainly
pinched by a belt, he, too, is Park Lane. And those two young men,