But not without a fight, thought Sophia firmly, digging her nose into the pillow. When things got worse – if things did, but probably they wouldn’t – if beer-and-Junes began to have a definitely bad effect upon life at the cottage and the characters of Harry and Francis, then Sophia would put up her tactful and cautious fight under the standard of Orderly Lives for Garden Orphans.

But fortunately the time had not yet come to think of making anything so uncomfortable as a decision.

CHAPTER XV

The part about his job which Francis liked best was going down to the Docks.

This happened on an average every ten days or so; but the most delightful thing about it was that he never knew when the order would be given him; and thus every morning he would go down to the City thinking ‘Perhaps I may go down to the Docks today,’ and his whole routine would be coloured by this pleasant feeling of excitement and anticipation.

On a blue soft day towards the end of May when London was full of drifting cloud shadows and the stone of its buildings looked very white, he was sent down to the Docks to collect some samples of silica.

He rode off on the top of his 142 bus feeling as exhilarated as though he were in a racing car, with the wind rushing through his hair and the interesting map of the City’s streets rolling out on either side of the bus. While the houses were still tall and decorated with gold lettering he saw two exciting cartloads; one of stiff hides, splaying out to every point of the compass with a bored-looking boy sitting on the top of them; and one of curly iron filings. It was oddly pleasant to see so many iron filings at once – goodness and mankind’s peculiar make-up alone knew why. ‘Coo! what a lot of iron filings!’ one thought, hanging over the side of the bus like everybody else, and staring; and one felt pleased.

But soon the tall, sinister warehouses with their red flaps began to dwindle as the bus moved down into Rotherhithe. Here the thrilling little houses began; thrilling in that old and finer sense of the word, which means a frisson, a strange chord struck suddenly upon the harp of the imagination. Goblins might live in these little houses of two low storeys, which were covered with dark yellow plaster of perhaps a hundred and twenty years old; the tremendous bright sky which swept over them dwarfed them still more. One had a door knocker like a hand grasping a wreath of iron flowers; some had little spaces of bright coarse grass in front, with the sturdy flowers that grow in cities; some had miniature Ionic columns on each side of their sooty front doors. Smaller they grew, until the bus towered over them as it thundered by. There were dates on some of them. ‘Liverpool Lawn, 1811’, ‘Waterloo Square, 1817’. Back into the past went the motor bus under the towering sky, until the clouds seemed to rise and rise, the little houses to cower and dwindle; and one saw in fancy the figure of a man on horseback across the heavens, and realized that the little goblin-houses had been built when the mighty shade of Napoleon lay over Europe.