Agnes. [With changed manner, flashing eyes, harsh voice, and violent gestures.] The sufferers, the toilers; that great crowd of old and young—­old and young stamped by excessive labour and privation all of one pattern—­whose backs bend under burdens, whose bones ache and grow awry, whose skins, in youth and in age, are wrinkled and yellow; those from whom a fair share of the earth’s space and of the light of day is withheld. [Looking down at him fiercely.] The half-starved who are bidden to stand with their feet in the kennel to watch gay processions in which you and your kind are borne high.  Those who would strip the robes from a dummy aristocracy and cast the broken dolls into the limbo of a nation’s discarded toys.  Those who—­mark me!—­are already upon the highway, marching, marching; whose time is coming as surely as yours is going!

St. Olpherts. [Clapping his hands gently.] Bravo!  Bravo!  Really a flash of the old fire.  Admirable! [She walks away to the window with an impatient exclamation.] Your present affaire du coeur does not wholly absorb you, then, Mrs. Ebbsmith.  Even now the murmurings of love have not entirely superseded the thunderous denunciations of—­h’m—­You once bore a nickname, my dear.

Agnes. [Turning sharply.] Ho!  So you’ve heard that, have you?

St. Olpherts.  Oh, yes.

Agnes.  Mad—­Agnes? [He bows deprecatingly.] We appear to have studied each other’s history pretty closely.

St. Olpherts.  Dear lady, this is not the first time the same roof has covered us.

Agnes.  No?

St. Olpherts.  Five years ago, on a broiling night in July, I joined a party of men who made an excursion from a club-house in St James’s Street to the unsavoury district of St. Luke’s.

Agnes.  Oh, yes.

St. Olpherts.  A depressin’ building; the Iron Hall, Barker
Street—­no—­Carter Street.

Agnes.  Precisely.

St. Olpherts.  We took our places amongst a handful of frowsy folks who cracked nuts and blasphemed.  On the platform stood a gaunt, white-faced young lady resolutely engaged in making up by extravagance of gesture for the deficiencies of an exhausted voice.  “There,” said one of my companions, “that is the notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith.”  Upon which a person near us, whom I judged from his air of leaden laziness to be a British working man, blurted out, “Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith!  Mad Agnes!  That’s the name her sanguinary friends give her—­Mad Agnes!” At that moment the eye of the panting oratress caught mine for an instant, and you and I first met.

Agnes. [Passing her hand across her brow, thoughtfully.] Mad—­Agnes . . . [To him, with a grim smile.] We have both been criticised, in our time, pretty sharply, eh, Duke?

St. Olpherts.  Yes.  Let that reflection make you more charitable to a poor peer. [A knock at the door.]