‘Sophronia, are you awake?’
‘Am I likely to be asleep, sir?’
’Very likely, I should think, after that fellow’s
company. Attend to what I am going to say.’
’I have attended to what you have already said,
have I not? What else have I been doing all to-night.’
‘Attend, I tell you,’ (in a raised voice)
’to what I am going to say. Keep close
to that idiot girl. Keep her under your thumb.
You have her fast, and you are not to let her go.
Do you hear?’
‘I hear you.’
’I foresee there is money to be made out of
this, besides taking that fellow down a peg.
We owe each other money, you know.’
Mrs Lammle winced a little at the reminder, but only
enough to shake her scents and essences anew into
the atmosphere of the little carriage, as she settled
herself afresh in her own dark corner.
THE SWEAT OF AN HONEST MAN’S BROW
Mr Mortimer Lightwood and Mr Eugene Wrayburn took
a coffee-house dinner together in Mr Lightwood’s
office. They had newly agreed to set up a joint
establishment together. They had taken a bachelor
cottage near Hampton, on the brink of the Thames,
with a lawn, and a boat-house; and all things fitting,
and were to float with the stream through the summer
and the Long Vacation.
It was not summer yet, but spring; and it was not
gentle spring ethereally mild, as in Thomson’s
Seasons, but nipping spring with an easterly wind,
as in Johnson’s, Jackson’s, Dickson’s,
Smith’s, and Jones’s Seasons. The
grating wind sawed rather than blew; and as it sawed,
the sawdust whirled about the sawpit. Every street
was a sawpit, and there were no top-sawyers; every
passenger was an under-sawyer, with the sawdust blinding
him and choking him.
That mysterious paper currency which circulates in
London when the wind blows, gyrated here and there
and everywhere. Whence can it come, whither can
it go? It hangs on every bush, flutters in every
tree, is caught flying by the electric wires, haunts
every enclosure, drinks at every pump, cowers at every
grating, shudders upon every plot of grass, seeks
rest in vain behind the legions of iron rails.
In Paris, where nothing is wasted, costly and luxurious
city though it be, but where wonderful human ants
creep out of holes and pick up every scrap, there
is no such thing. There, it blows nothing but
dust. There, sharp eyes and sharp stomachs reap
even the east wind, and get something out of it.
The wind sawed, and the sawdust whirled. The
shrubs wrung their many hands, bemoaning that they
had been over-persuaded by the sun to bud; the young
leaves pined; the sparrows repented of their early
marriages, like men and women; the colours of the
rainbow were discernible, not in floral spring, but
in the faces of the people whom it nibbled and pinched.
And ever the wind sawed, and the sawdust whirled.
