Mrs. Viveash looked round. The cab-drivers and the other consumers of midnight coffee had gathered in an interested circle, curious and sympathetic, round the figure of a woman who was sitting, like a limp bundle tied up in black cotton and mackintosh, on the stall-keeper’s high stool, leaning wearily against the wall of the booth. A man stood beside her drinking tea out of a thick white cup. Every one was talking at once. “Mayn’t the poor wretches talk?” asked Mrs. Viveash, turning back to Bruin. “I never knew any one who had the lower classes on the brain as much as you have.” “I loathe them,” said Bruin. “I hate every one poor, or ill, or old. Can’t abide them; they make me positively sick.” “_Quelle âme bien-née_,” piped Mr. Mercaptan. “And how well and frankly you express what we all feel and lack the courage to say.” Lypiatt gave vent to indignant laughter. “I remember when I was a little boy,” Bruin went on, “my old grandfather used to tell me stories about his childhood. He told me that when he was about five or six, just before the passing of the Reform Bill of ’thirty-two, there was a song which all right-thinking people used to sing, with a chorus that went like this: ‘Rot the People, blast the People, damn the Lower Classes.’ I wish I knew the rest of the words and the tune. It must have been a good song.” Coleman was enraptured with the song. He shouldered his walking-stick and began marching round and round the nearest lamp-post chanting the words to a stirring march tune. “Rot the People, blast the People....” He marked the rhythm with heavy stamps of his feet. “Ah, if only they’d invent servants with internal combustion engines,” said Bruin, almost pathetically. “However well trained they are, they always betray their humanity occasionally. And that is really intolerable.” “How tedious is a guilty conscience!” Gumbril murmured the quotation. “But Mr. Shearwater,” said Myra, bringing back the conversation to more congenial themes, “hasn’t told us yet what he thinks of arms.” “Nothing at all,” said Shearwater. “I’m occupied with the regulation of the blood at the moment.” “But is it true what he says, Theodore?” She appealed to Gumbril. “I should think so.” Gumbril’s answer was rather dim and remote. He was straining to hear the talk of Bruin’s _canaille_, and Mrs. Viveash’s question seemed a little irrelevant. “I used to do cartin’ jobs,” the man with the teacup was saying. “’Ad a van and a nold pony of me own. And didn’t do so badly neither. The only trouble was me lifting furniture and ’eavy weights about the place. Because I ’ad malaria out in India, in the war....” “Nor even—you compel me to violate the laws of modesty—nor even,” Mrs. Viveash went on, smiling painfully, speaking huskily, expiringly, “of legs?”