‘Ah, poor wench!  And the kind of reward she gets?’

’We can hardly examine . . . mysterious dispensations . . . here we are to make the best we can of it.’

’For the creature Society’s indebted to?  True.  And am I to think there’s a body of legal gentlemen to join with you, my friend, in founding an Institution to distribute funds to preach charity over the country, and win compassion for her, as one of the principal persons of her time, that Society’s indebted to for whatever it’s indebted for?’

‘Scarcely that,’ said Carling, contracting.

’But you ‘re for great Reforms?’

‘Gradual.’

‘Then it’s for Reformatories, mayhap.’

‘They would hardly be a cure.’

’You ‘re in search of a cure?’

‘It would be a blessed discovery.’

‘But what’s to become of Society?’

‘It’s a puzzle to the cleverest.’

’All through History, my dear Mr. Carling, we see that.

‘Establishments must have their sacrifices.  Beware of interfering:  eh?’

‘By degrees, we may hope . . . .’

’Society prudently shuns the topic; and so ’ll we.  For we might tell of one another, in a fit of distraction, that t’ other one talked of it, and we should be banished for an offence against propriety.  You should read my friend Durance’s Essay on Society.  Lawyers are a buttress of Society.  But, come:  I wager they don’t know what they support until they read that Essay.’

Carling had a pleasant sense of escape, in not being personally asked to read the Essay, and not hearing that a copy of it should be forwarded to him.

He said:  ‘Mr. Radnor is a very old friend?’

’Our fathers were friends; they served in the same regiment for years.  I was in India when Victor Radnor took the fatal!’

‘Followed by a second, not less . . . ?’

’In the interpretation of a rigid morality arming you legal gentlemen to make it so!’

‘The Law must be vindicated.’

‘The law is a clumsy bludgeon.’

’We think it the highest effort of human reason—­the practical instrument.’

’You may compare it to a rustic’s finger on a fiddlestring, for the murdered notes you get out of the practical instrument.

‘I am bound to defend it, clumsy bludgeon or not.’

’You are one of the giants to wield it, and feel humanly, when, by chance, down it comes on the foot an inch off the line.—­Here’s a peep of Old London; if the habit of old was not to wash windows.  I like these old streets!’

‘Hum,’ Carling hesitated.  ’I can remember when the dirt at the windows was appalling.’

’Appealing to the same kind of stuff in the passing youngster’s green-scum eye:  it was.  And there your Law did good work.—­You’re for Bordeaux.  What is your word on Burgundy?’

‘Our Falernian!’