Part 3
She dismissed the first hotels she passed, she scarcely knew why,
mainly perhaps from the mere dread of entering them, and crossed
Waterloo Bridge at a leisurely pace. It was high afternoon,
there was no great throng of foot-passengers, and many an eye
from omnibus and pavement rested gratefully on her fresh, trim
presence as she passed young and erect, with the light of
determination shining through the quiet self-possession of her
face. She was dressed as English girls do dress for town,
without either coquetry or harshness: her collarless blouse
confessed a pretty neck, her eyes were bright and steady, and her
dark hair waved loosely and graciously over her ears. . . .
It seemed at first the most beautiful afternoon of all time to
her, and perhaps the thrill of her excitement did add a
distinctive and culminating keenness to the day. The river, the
big buildings on the north bank, Westminster, and St. Paul's,
were rich and wonderful with the soft sunshine of London, the
softest, the finest grained, the most penetrating and least
emphatic sunshine in the world. The very carts and vans and cabs
that Wellington Street poured out incessantly upon the bridge
seemed ripe and good in her eyes. A traffic of copious barges
slumbered over the face of the river-barges either altogether
stagnant or dreaming along in the wake of fussy tugs; and above
circled, urbanely voracious, the London seagulls. She had never
been there before at that hour, in that light, and it seemed to
her as if she came to it all for the first time. And this great
mellow place, this London, now was hers, to struggle with, to go
where she pleased in, to overcome and live in. "I am glad," she
told herself, "I came."
She marked an hotel that seemed neither opulent nor odd in a
little side street opening on the Embankment, made up her mind
with an effort, and, returning by Hungerford Bridge to Waterloo,
took a cab to this chosen refuge with her two pieces of luggage.
There was just a minute's hesitation before they gave her a room.
The young lady in the bureau said she would inquire, and Ann
Veronica, while she affected to read the appeal on a hospital
collecting-box upon the bureau counter, had a disagreeable sense
of being surveyed from behind by a small, whiskered gentleman in
a frock-coat, who came out of the inner office and into the hall
among a number of equally observant green porters to look at her
and her bags. But the survey was satisfactory, and she found
herself presently in Room No. 47, straightening her hat and
waiting for her luggage to appear.
"All right so far," she said to herself. . . .
