“‘Ere, you’re seven standin’ inside,” said the gentleman ’bus—­conductor, when, after long sojourn in upper regions, he came down to his basement floor.  “Five standin’ is all I’m supposed to ‘ave, an’ five standin’ is all I’ll allow.  Why should I get myself into trouble for ‘avin’ more’n five standin’, if five standin’ is all I’m allowed to ’ave?”

In spite of a chorus of nervous assent from all his flock, and the blushing disappearance of the two superfluous standers, the ’bus-conductor continued his lament in this strain.  To the man with a small but loud grievance, sympathy is a fatal offering.

The ’bus-conductor had a round red nose, and very defective teeth.  Kew studied him in a new light, for this was Jay’s fellow-worker.  Somehow it seemed very regrettable.

“I wish I hadn’t promised not to tell the Family,” he thought.

He and Jay never broke their promises to each other, and there was a tacit agreement that when they found it necessary to lie to each other, they always gave each other warning.  Where the rest of the world was concerned, I am afraid they used their discretion in this matter.

“It ought to be stopped.  The tactful foot of Family authority ought to step on it.”

He presented his penny angrily to the ’bus-conductor.

“I expect this sort of man asks Jay to walk out with him,” he thought, and with a cold glance took the ticket offered to him.

“Lucky I’m so utterly selfish,” he thought, “or I should be devilish worried.”

His train was one which boasted a restaurant car, and Kew patronised this institution.  But when he was in the middle of cold meat, he thought:  “She is probably trying to live on twopence-halfpenny a week.  Continual tripe and onions.”

So he refused pudding.  The pudding, persistent as only a railway pudding can be, came back incredulously three times.  But Kew pushed it away.

“If I could get anybody outside the Family to use their influence, I should be within the letter of the law.  But I mostly know subalterns, and nobody below a Brigadier would be likely to have much influence with Jay.  She’d probably talk down even a sergeant-major.”

It seems curious that he should deplore the fact that Jay had turned into a bus-conductor more deeply than he had deplored her experiments in sweated employment.  I think that a uniformed sister or wife is almost unbearable to most men, except, perhaps, one in the nurse’s uniform, of which even St. Paul might have approved.  The gaiters of the ’bus-conductor had shaken Kew to his foundations.  The thought of the skirt still brought his heart into his mouth.  He was so lacking in the modern mind that he still considered himself a gentleman.  No Socialist, speaking between clenched teeth in a strangled voice of largely groundless protest, had ever gained the ear of Kew.  He had never joined a society of any sort.  He had never attended a public meeting since he gave up being a Salvationist at the age of ten.