And it is well that you should have the picture of them right:  Lewisham in the ready-made overcoat, blue cloth and velvet collar, dirty tan gloves, red tie, and bowler hat; and Ethel in a two-year-old jacket and hat of curly Astrachan; both pink-cheeked from the keen air, shyly arm in arm occasionally, and very alert to miss no possible spectacle.  The shops were varied and interesting along the Brompton Road, but nothing to compare with Piccadilly.  There were windows in Piccadilly so full of costly little things, it took fifteen minutes to get them done, card shops, drapers’ shops full of foolish, entertaining attractions.  Lewisham, in spite of his old animosities, forgot to be severe on the Shopping Class, Ethel was so vastly entertained by all these pretty follies.

Then up Regent Street by the place where the sham diamonds are, and the place where the girls display their long hair, and the place where the little chickens run about in the window, and so into Oxford Street, Holborn, Ludgate Hill, St. Paul’s Churchyard, to Leadenhall, and the markets where turkeys, geese, ducklings, and chickens—­turkeys predominant, however—­hang in rows of a thousand at a time.

“I must buy you something,” said Lewisham, resuming a topic.

“No, no,” said Ethel, with her eye down a vista of innumerable birds.

“But I must,” said Lewisham.  “You had better choose it, or I shall get something wrong.”  His mind ran on brooches and clasps.

“You mustn’t waste your money, and besides, I have that ring.”

But Lewisham insisted.

“Then—­if you must—­I am starving.  Buy me something to eat.”

An immense and memorable joke.  Lewisham plunged recklessly—­orientally—­into an awe-inspiring place with mitred napkins.  They lunched on cutlets—­stripped the cutlets to the bone—­and little crisp brown potatoes, and they drank between them a whole half bottle of—­some white wine or other, Lewisham selected in an off-hand way from the list.  Neither of them had ever taken wine at a meal before.  One-and-ninepence it cost him, Sir, and the name of it was Capri!  It was really very passable Capri—­a manufactured product, no doubt, but warming and aromatic.  Ethel was aghast at his magnificence and drank a glass and a half.

Then, very warm and comfortable, they went down by the Tower, and the Tower Bridge with its crest of snow, huge pendant icicles, and the ice blocks choked in its side arches, was seasonable seeing.  And as they had had enough of shops and crowds they set off resolutely along the desolate Embankment homeward.