There was a black fog, cold and
heavy as a dripping fur coat. Out of its folds loomed motor-omnibuses,
monstrous mechanical demons such as Mary had never seen nor pictured.
The noise and rush of traffic stunned her into silence, as she drove
with her old friend in a four-wheeled cab toward Cromwell Road. There,
she imagined, would be peace and quiet; but not so. They stopped before
a house, past which a wild storm of motor-omnibuses and vans and
taxicabs and private cars swept ceaselessly in two directions. It seemed
impossible to Mary that people could live in such a place. She was
supposed to stay for a month or two in London, and then, if she still
wished to see Italy, her aunt and cousin would make it convenient to go
with her. But, before the dark green door behind Corinthian pillars had
opened, the girl was resolving to hurry out of London somehow, anyhow,
with or without her relatives. She decided this with the singular,
silent intensity of purpose that she did not even know to be
characteristic of herself, though it had carried her through a severe
ordeal at the convent; for Mary had never yet studied her own emotions
or her own nature. The instant that the Home-Davises, mother and
daughter, greeted her in their chilly drawing-room, she lost all doubt
as to whether she should leave London with or without them. It would be
without them that she must go. How she was to contrive this, the girl
did not know in the least, but she knew that the thing would have to be
done.
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