“I suppose you’re a stranger over here?”

“I’ve been in England seven months, but not yet in London,” replied the other.  “I count on doing some good there—­it is time!” A bitter and pathetic smile showed for a second on his lips.  “It won’t be my fault if I fail.  You are English, Sir?”

Shelton nodded.

“Forgive my asking; your voice lacks something I’ve nearly always noticed in the English a kind of—­’comment cela s’appelle’—­cocksureness, coming from your nation’s greatest quality.”

“And what is that?” asked Shelton with a smile.

“Complacency,” replied the youthful foreigner.

“Complacency!” repeated Shelton; “do you call that a great quality?”

“I should rather say, monsieur, a great defect in what is always a great people.  You are certainly the most highly-civilised nation on the earth; you suffer a little from the fact.  If I were an English preacher my desire would be to prick the heart of your complacency.”

Shelton, leaning back, considered this impertinent suggestion.

“Hum!” he said at last, “you’d be unpopular; I don’t know that we’re any cockier than other nations.”

The young foreigner made a sign as though confirming this opinion.

“In effect,” said he, “it is a sufficiently widespread disease.  Look at these people here”—­and with a rapid glance he pointed to the inmates of the carnage,—­“very average persons!  What have they done to warrant their making a virtuous nose at those who do not walk as they do?  That old rustic, perhaps, is different—­he never thinks at all—­but look at those two occupied with their stupidities about the price of hops, the prospects of potatoes, what George is doing, a thousand things all of that sort—­look at their faces; I come of the bourgeoisie myself—­have they ever shown proof of any quality that gives them the right to pat themselves upon the back?  No fear!  Outside potatoes they know nothing, and what they do not understand they dread and they despise—­there are millions of that breed.  ‘Voila la Societe’!  The sole quality these people have shown they have is cowardice.  I was educated by the Jesuits,” he concluded; “it has given me a way of thinking.”

Under ordinary circumstances Shelton would have murmured in a well-bred voice, “Ah! quite so,” and taken refuge in the columns of the Daily Telegraph.  In place of this, for some reason that he did not understand, he looked at the young foreigner, and asked,

“Why do you say all this to me?”

The tramp—­for by his boots he could hardly have been better—­hesitated.

“When you’ve travelled like me,” he said, as if resolved to speak the truth, “you acquire an instinct in choosing to whom and how you speak.  It is necessity that makes the law; if you want to live you must learn all that sort of thing to make face against life.”

Shelton, who himself possessed a certain subtlety, could not but observe the complimentary nature of these words.  It was like saying “I’m not afraid of you misunderstanding me, and thinking me a rascal just because I study human nature.”