Miss Ford was saying, "Really, Bernard...." Sarah Brown felt a slight misgiving.
A warm and rather dramatic-looking light was shining behind the red curtain of the ferryman's lattice window, as Sarah Brown crossed the moonlit road.

She delighted, after her recent black hours, to think of all those people in the world who were sitting stuffily and pleasantly in little ugly rooms that they loved, doing quiet careful things that pleased them.

And she told herself that the thought of Richard's little office, alone and alight in the deserted City every night, would comfort her often in the darkness.
The ferryman opened his door, and invited her genially to his telephone.
He had been sitting at his table, surrounded by the snakes that for him took the place of a family.

On the table was a bowl of milk from which a large bull-snake, in a gay Turkey-carpet design, was drinking.

A yellow and black python lay coiled in several figures of eight in the armchair, and an intelligent-looking small dust-coloured snake with a broad nose and an active tongue leaned out of the ferryman's breast pocket.
"Aren't they beautiful ?" he said, with shy and paternal pride, as Sarah Brown tried to find a place on which the python would like to be tickled or scratched.