At the Surrey Docks Station Francis got down, and hesitated for a moment, wondering whether he should take a bus across the three bridges to Tartar Lane, or walk. Whether he walked or rode, he might be held up for half an hour while a string of barges or a tug went under any one of the three swing bridges, which cut across the route to Tartar Lane. Down in the Docks, the river rules the road traffic. The Thames has no power at all in New Bond Street, but near Tartar Lane, roads running close to the Docks are liable to be split suddenly in half while a ship sails through the middle of them, and the passengers sit resignedly in the motor buses, getting very friendly while they wait to be released.

Francis decided to take a motor bus because he liked being held up in one. Last time he came down to Tartar Lane he was held up for over half an hour, and an old man who was sitting next to him alternately showed him wonderful green and red dragons tattooed on his legs and talked very fiercely against these ’ere Fasheests, who, he thought, would land us in a mess if we wasn’t careful.

So he got into a bus, hoping for the best, and it set off along an ordinary dusty white London road running between wooden fences, above which showed long piles of bright gold planks; and they safely passed the first bridge, and everyone looked hopeful.

But when they got to the second bridge, by which stood a neat old yellow house with a bush of lilac blowing sideways in its garden and making it look, not like a house in the country, but like exactly what it was, a cottage in the heart of London, that reef of linked and submerged villages – when the bus got there it slowed down in a resigned manner, and stopped.

The engine’s noise died to a gentle throbbing. The driver twisted himself in his seat, exchanged a short, bored pantomime through the glass of his window with the conductor, and unfolded a Lunch Edition of the Standard. The conductor, who apparently had nothing to read, looked away aloofly at the lilac bush. The passengers were silent, and a siren sounded close by.

Francis had been looking at his fellow travellers, wondering if any of them would prove as interesting as the old man with the red dragons on his legs, and had decided that none of them possibly could, except a dark blue hat, a rim of fair shining curls, and the back of a white neck which was provokingly turned towards him.

He was sitting on one of the two long seats near the entrance; the girl with the white neck was sitting halfway down on the same side, but on one of the short transverse seats. She was alone, and she was carrying a brown paper parcel and a bunch of wallflowers and purple tulips carefully wrapped in blue tissue paper, the kind that some laundries slip between people’s shirts with that capacity for fussing over unimportant details and failure to practise attention to the larger virtues like punctuality, reliability, etc., which distinguishes laundries as a whole.