Suddenly,
as though drawn by invisible hands, they, too, stepped over the railing,
and, silent as shadows, were gone from the light.
The stillness, enclosed in the far, inexorable roar of the town, was
alive with the myriad passions, hopes, and loves of multitudes of
struggling human atoms; for in spite of the disapproval of that great
body of Forsytes, the Municipal Council--to whom Love had long been
considered, next to the Sewage Question, the gravest danger to the
community--a process was going on that night in the Park, and in a
hundred other parks, without which the thousand factories, churches,
shops, taxes, and drains, of which they were custodians, were as
arteries without blood, a man without a heart.
The instincts of self-forgetfulness, of passion, and of love, hiding
under the trees, away from the trustees of their remorseless enemy,
the 'sense of property,' were holding a stealthy revel, and Soames,
returning from Bayswater for he had been alone to dine at Timothy's
walking home along the water, with his mind upon that coming lawsuit,
had the blood driven from his heart by a low laugh and the sound of
kisses. He thought of writing to the Times the next morning, to draw
the attention of the Editor to the condition of our parks.
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