“Go along.  How could I?”

“Might have been managed, Polly,” he answered musingly.  “Never mind, better luck next time.  What you’ve got to do, my angel, is to find where that lady lives—­the one that sat next our friend, you know, not the foreigner.  Keep your eyes open, Polly, and be smart, and if you tell me where she lives then I shall have something more to say to you.  It’s between me and you, my beauty.  You just bring me that little bit of information and you won’t regret it.”

CHAPTER XIV

MR. PARISH PURSUES A BROUGHAM

Christopher Parish lived at home, that is to say, he was not a lodger under an alien roof, like the majority of such young men in London, but abode with his own people—­his mother, his elder brother, and his brother’s wife.  They had a decent little house in Kennington, managed—­rather better than such houses generally are—­by Mrs. Parish the younger, who was childless, and thus able to devote herself to what she called “hyjene,” a word constantly on her lips and on those of her husband.  Mr. Theodore Parish, aged about five-and-thirty, was an audit clerk in the offices of a railway company, and he loved to expatiate on the hardship of his position, which lay in the fact that he could not hope for a higher income than one hundred and fifty pounds, and this despite the trying and responsible nature of the duties he discharged.  After dwelling upon this injustice he would add, with peculiar gravity, that really in certain moods one all but inclined to give a hearing to the arguments of socialistic agitators.  In other moods, and these more frequent, Mr. Parish indulged in native optimism, tempered by anxiety in matters of “hyjene.”  He was much preoccupied with the laundry question.

“Now, are you quite sure, Ada, that this laundress is a conscientious woman?  Does she manage her establishment on modern principles?  I beg you will make a personal inspection.  If ever a laundress refuses to let you make a personal inspection be sure there is something wrong.  Just think how vital it is, this washing question.  We send our clothes, our personal garments, to a strange house to be mixed with—­”

And so on at great length, Mrs. Theodore listening patiently and approvingly.  With equal solicitude did they discuss the food upon their table.

“Theo, I shall have to change our baker.”

“Ah, indeed!  Why?”

“I hardly like to tell you, but perhaps I had better.  I have only just found out that a sewer-trap quite close to his shop gives out a most offensive affluvia, especially in this hot weather.  The air must be full of germs.  I hardly know whet her we ought to eat even this loaf.  What do you think?”

Every one’s dinner was spoilt.  Theodore declared that really, when one considered the complicated and expensive machinery of local government, if sewer traps and affluvias were allowed to exist in the immediate neighbourhood of bakers’ shops, why it really made one inclined to think and ask whether there might not be something in the arguments of the Socialists.