CHAPTER XLI

CONTAINS A REVELATION OF THE ORIGIN OF THE TIGRESS IN DIANA

An afternoon of high summer blazed over London through the City’s awning of smoke, and the three classes of the population, relaxed by the weariful engagement with what to them was a fruitless heat, were severally bathing their ideas in dreams of the contrast possible to embrace:  breezy seas or moors, aerial Alps, cool beer.  The latter, if confessedly the lower comfort, is the readier at command; and Thomas Redworth, whose perspiring frame was directing his inward vision to fly for solace to a trim new yacht, built on his lines, beckoning from Southampton Water, had some of the amusement proper to things plucked off the levels, in the conversation of a couple of journeymen close ahead of him, as he made his way from a quiet street of brokers’ offices to a City Bank.  One asked the other if he had ever tried any of that cold stuff they were now selling out of barrows, with cream.  His companion answered, that he had not got much opinion of stuff of the sort; and what was it like?

‘Well, it’s cheap, it ain’t bad; it’s cooling.  But it ain’t refreshing.’

‘Just what I reckoned all that newfangle rubbish.’

Without a consultation, the conservatives in beverage filed with a smart turn about, worthy of veterans at parade on the drill-ground, into a public-house; and a dialogue chiefly remarkable for absence of point, furnished matter to the politician’s head of the hearer.  Provided that their beer was unadulterated!  Beer they would have; and why not, in weather like this?  But how to make the publican honest!  And he was not the only trickster preying on the multitudinous poor copper crowd, rightly to be protected by the silver and the golden.  Revelations of the arts practised to plump them with raw-earth and minerals in the guise of nourishment, had recently knocked at the door of the general conscience and obtained a civil reply from the footman.  Repulsive as the thought was to one still holding to Whiggish Liberalism, though flying various Radical kites, he was caught by the decisive ultratorrent, and whirled to amid the necessity for the interference of the State, to stop the poisoning of the poor.  Upper classes have never legislated systematically in their interests; and quid . . . rabidae tradis ovile lupae? says one of the multitude.  We may be seeing fangs of wolves where fleeces waxed.  The State that makes it a vital principle to concern itself with the helpless poor, meets instead of waiting for Democracy; which is a perilous flood but when it is dammed.  Or else, in course of time, luxurious yachting, my friend, will encounter other reefs and breakers than briny ocean’s!  Capital, whereat Diana Warwick aimed her superbest sneer, has its instant duties.  She theorized on the side of poverty, and might do so:  he had no right to be theorizing on the side of riches.  Across St. George’s Channel, the cry for humanity in Capital was an agony.  He ought to be there, doing, not cogitating.  The post of Irish Secretary must be won by real service founded on absolute local knowledge.  Yes, and sympathy, if you like; but sympathy is for proving, not prating . . . .