She strove momentarily to understand the reason of these great sleeping stations; but fatigue, emotional and physical, had robbed her of all intelligent curiosity in the phenomena of the mysterious and formidable city.
Presently the porter threw the trunk on his shoulder and she trudged after him up steps and over an iron bridge and down steps; and an express whizzed like a flying shell through the station and vanished.
And at a wicket, in a ragged road, there actually stood a cab and a skeleton of a horse between the shafts.

The driver bounced up, enheartened at sight of the trunk and the inexperienced, timid girl; but the horse did not stir in its crooked coma.
"What address, miss ?" asked the cabman.
"Cedars House, Harringay Park Road." The cabman paused in intense thought, and after a few seconds responded cheerfully: "Yes, miss." The porter touched his cap for threepence.

The lashed horse plunged forward.

Hilda leaned back in the creaking and depraved vehicle, and sighed, "So this is their London!" She found herself travelling in the direction from which she had come, parallel to the railway, down the longest street that she had ever seen.
On her left were ten thousand small new houses, all alike.

On her right were broken patches of similar houses, interspersed with fragments of green field and views of the arches of the railway; the conception of the horrible patience which had gone to the construction of these endless, endless arches made her feel sick.
The cab turned into another road, and another; and then stopped.