Shelton returned to the kitchen, and directly after took leave of the little Frenchman, who said, with a kind of moral button-holing, as if trying to adopt him as a patron: 

“Trust me, monsieur; if he comes back—­that young man—­he shall have your letter without fail.  My name is Carolan Jules Carolan; and I am always at your service.”

CHAPTER IV

THE PLAY

Shelton walked away; he had been indulging in a nightmare.  “That old actor was drunk,” thought he, “and no doubt he was an Irishman; still, there may be truth in what he said.  I am a Pharisee, like all the rest who are n’t in the pit.  My respectability is only luck.  What should I have become if I’d been born into his kind of life?” and he stared at a stream of people coming from the Stares, trying to pierce the mask of their serious, complacent faces.  If these ladies and gentlemen were put into that pit into which he had been looking, would a single one of them emerge again?  But the effort of picturing them there was too much for him; it was too far—­too ridiculously far.

One particular couple, a large; fine man and wife, who, in the midst of all the dirt and rumbling hurry, the gloomy, ludicrous, and desperately jovial streets, walked side by side in well-bred silence, had evidently bought some article which pleased them.  There was nothing offensive in their manner; they seemed quite unconcerned at the passing of the other people.  The man had that fine solidity of shoulder and of waist, the glossy self-possession that belongs to those with horses, guns, and dressing-bags.  The wife, her chin comfortably settled in her fur, kept her grey eyes on the ground, and, when she spoke, her even and unruffled voice reached Shelton’s ears above all the whirring of the traffic.  It was leisurely precise, as if it had never hurried, had never been exhausted, or passionate, or afraid.  Their talk, like that of many dozens of fine couples invading London from their country places, was of where to dine, what theatre they should go to, whom they had seen, what they should buy.  And Shelton knew that from day’s end to end, and even in their bed, these would be the subjects of their conversation.  They were the best-bred people of the sort he met in country houses and accepted as of course, with a vague discomfort at the bottom of his soul.  Antonia’s home, for instance, had been full of them.  They were the best-bred people of the sort who supported charities, knew everybody, had clear, calm judgment, and intolerance of all such conduct as seemed to them “impossible,” all breaches of morality, such as mistakes of etiquette, such as dishonesty, passion, sympathy (except with a canonised class of objects—­the legitimate sufferings, for instance, of their own families and class).  How healthy they were!  The memory of the doss-house worked in Shelton’s mind like poison.  He was conscious that in his own groomed figure, in the