Dressing was delirium, and Kitty had to adjure Mike to say no more; if he did she should go mad.  Breakfast had to be skipped, and it was only by bribing a cabman to gallop to Westminster that they caught the coach.  Even so they would have missed it had not Mike sprung at risk of limb from the hansom and sped on the toes of his patent leather shoes down the street, his gray cover coat flying.

“What a toff he is,” thought Kitty, full of the pride of her love.  Bessie, whom dear Laura had successfully chaperoned into well-kept estate, sat with Dicky on the box; Laura sat with Harding in the back seat; Muchross and Snowdown sat opposite them.  The middle of the coach was taken up by what Muchross said were a couple of bar-girls and their mashers.

On rolled the coach over Westminster Bridge, through Lambeth, in picturesqueness and power, a sympathetic survival of aristocratic days.  The aristocracy and power so vital in the coach was soon communicated to those upon it.  And now when Jem Gregory, the celebrated whip, with one leg swinging over the side, tootled, the passers-by seemed littler than ever, the hansoms at the corner seemed smaller, and the folk standing at their poor doors seemed meaner.  As they passed through those hungry streets, ragged urchins came alongside, throwing themselves over and over, beseeching coppers from Muchross, and he threw a few, urging them to further prostrations.  Tootle, Jim, tootle; whether they starve or whether they feed, we have no thought.  The clatter of the hooves of the bays resounds through those poor back-rooms, full of human misery; the notes of our horn are perhaps sounding now in dying ears.  Tootle, Jim, tootle; what care we for that pale mother and her babe, or that toiling coster whose barrow is too heavy for him!  If there is to be revolution, it will not be in our time; we are the end of the world.  Laura is with us to-day, Bessie sits on the box, Kitty is with our Don Juan; we know there is gold in our pockets, we see our courtesans by us, our gallant bays are bearing us away to pleasure.  Tootle, Jim, my boy, tootle; the great Muchross is shouting derision at the poor perspiring coster.  “Pull up, you devil, pull up,” he cries, and shouts to the ragged urchins and scatters halfpence that they may tumble once more in the dirt.  See the great Muchross, the clean-shaven face of the libertine priest, the small sardonic eyes.  Hurrah for the great Muchross!  Long may he live, the singer of “What cheer, Ria?” the type and epitome of the life whose outward signs are drags, brandies-and-soda, and pale neckties.

Gaily trotted the four bays, and as Clapham was approached brick tenements disappeared in Portland stone and iron railings.  A girl was seen swinging; the white flannels of tennis players passed to and fro, and a lady stood by a tall vase watering red geraniums.  Harding told Mike that the shaven lawns and the greenhouses explained the lives of the inhabitants, and represented their ideas; and Laura’s account of the money she had betted was followed by an anecdote concerning a long ramble in a wood, with a man who had walked her about all day without even so much as once asking her if she had a mouth on her.