I love the Thames Embankment. To me it seems a thousand times more
romantic and wonderful than the canals of Venice or the crocodile-y
charms of the Nile. The water is so sad and so wicked--the wisest,
wickedest thing in England, flowing greyly between the great palaces of
commerce; floating little ships and dirty hulks; holding up to the
sunset, in places, a tangled mass of sails, a veritable fretwork; the
humbler and less ostentatious commerce of the world flows through its
veins, dear furtive, dirty, splendid, muddy old river!
I looked over the parapet. Once in my dim, funny little far-away youth,
when impressions sort of bedded themselves down on your mind, I had
driven in a hansom with mother and father from Blackfriars to Waterloo;
and all the electric signs over the warehouses on the bank had streaked
the water with colour, and all the Embankment had been fringed with
electric lights, and I had cried with the beauty of it, and mother and
father had been curious as to the cause of my emotion, and then angry
because I wouldn't tell them--but how could I tell them I was crying
because somebody's whisky advertisement looked so lovely on the water.
I remembered as I looked in the water and thought how jolly it is to be
able to feel sad and romantically melancholy about abstract things, and
let yourself go, when the real sorrows come there is always something to
prevent you from letting yourself go.
I wondered why I wasn't feeling more awful about Cheneston's marriage to
Grace.