Strolling the London streets with her husband, Helen Ambrose reflects that in all the decades she’s lived in London, she’s never grown to love it. She has depression, and seeing London’s streets makes her feel sadder, especially the endless sight of the poor. Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose are expected on a ship, the Euphrosyne, anchored in the Thames, and they engage a horse-drawn cab to take them from the West End into the heart of the city, where the ship awaits them. As they travel farther into the city, Mrs. Ambrose is further upset by the industrial squalor and poverty around her, and she reflects on what her own life would have been like if she had been poor, imagining herself walking in circles around Piccadilly Circus all her days. When the cab can go no further, they find an old man with a rowboat who offers to row them out to their ship, where their niece, Rachel Vinrace, the 24-year-old daughter of the ship’s owner, is in the saloon waiting for them. She’s nervous because she hasn’t seen her uncle and aunt in a long time and knows that she must entertain them somehow.