“You’re a wonderful fellow,” said I, somewhat enviously.

He gave an awkward laugh and tugged at his beard.

“I’ve only happened to find my job, and am doing it as well as I can,” he said. “’Tisn’t very much, after all.  Sometimes one gets discouraged; people are such ungrateful pigs, but now and again one does help a lame dog over a stile which bucks one up, you know.  Why don’t you come down and have a look at us one of these days?  You’ve been promising to do so for years.”

“I will,” said I with sudden interest.

“You can have a peep at one or two of the competing homes.  We pop into them unexpectedly at all hours.  That’s a part of the game.  We’ve a complicated system of marks which I’ll show you.  Of course, no woman knows how she’s getting on, otherwise many would lose heart.”

“How do the men like this disconcerting ubiquity of soap and water?”

“They love it!” he cried.  “They’re keen on the prize too.  Some think they’ll grab the lot and have the devil’s own drunk when the year’s up.  But I’ll look after that.  Besides, when a chap has been living in the pride of cleanliness for a year he’ll get into the way of it and be less likely to make a beast of himself.  Anyway, I hope for the best.  My God, de Gex, if I didn’t hope and hope and hope,” he cried earnestly, “I don’t know how I should get through anything without hope and a faith in the ultimate good of things.”

“The same inconvincible optimist?” said I.

“Yes.  Thank heaven.  And you?”

I paused.  There came a self-revelatory flash.  “At the present moment,” I said, “I’m a perfectly convincible vacuist.”

We left the tram and the main thoroughfare, and turned into frowsy streets, peopled with frowsy men and women and raucous with the bickering play of frowsy children.  It was still daylight.  Over London the spring had fluttered its golden pinions, and I knew that in more blessed quarters—­in the great parks, in Piccadilly, in Old Palace Yard, half a mile away—­its fragrance lingered, quickening blood already quickened by hope, and making happier hearts already happy.  But here the ray of spring had never penetrated either that day or the days of former springs; so there was no lingering fragrance.  Here no one heeded the aspects of the changing year save when suffocated by sweltering heat, or frozen in the bitter cold, or drenched by the pouring rain.  Otherwise in these gray, frowsy streets spring, summer, autumn, winter were all the same to the grey, frowsy people.  It is true that youth laughed—­pale, animal boys, and pale, flat-chested girls.  But it laughed chiefly at inane obscenity.

One of these days, when phonography is as practicable as photography, some one will make accurate records in these frowsy streets, and then, after the manner of the elegant writers of Bucolics and Pastorals, publish such a series of Urbanics and Pavimentals, phonographic dialogues between the Colins and Dulcibellas of the pavement and the gutter as will freeze up Hell with horror.