“Pray, Mr. Giles Inglett, how would you like to go back to potato pasty and cold boiled junk of bacon? To an early dinner, and swipes instead of claret? To getting your clothes at a slop-shop, instead of being fitted by a tailor? To being without books and magazines and reviews? Are you aware that you have earned not one of the luxuries or even comforts of civilised life? That they have come to you undeserved as does free Grace? Upon my word, you make my blood splutter! Shall I tell you what would have been the end of you had not Lord Lamerton come to the rescue? After you were ill you would have been cared for, or not cared for, after the fashion of common folk’s children, and your mother’s haphazard way of doing everything, allowed to get your feet wet, and stand in draughts, neglected one day, coddled the next, till your weak lungs gave way, and rapid consumption set in. Shall I tell you what would have been the course of Act II? Then you would have been mewed up in that dismal back bedroom at Chillacot, with the ultramarine wash on the walls, and the snipped, emerald-green, silver-paper fly trap suspended in the middle of the room, and the blistered mirror, and the window looking out at a dripping rock, ugh! There you would have lain and coughed; and when an attempt was made to light the fire, the smoke would have refused to try the road up the chimney, and preferred that to your lungs; and when the window was opened to let the smoke out it would have let in the smell of the pigstye. When you wanted a book to enliven you, you would have been given Baxter’s ‘Saints’ Rest’ or a Methodist Missionary Magazine, and death itself would have been welcome as an escape from such literature. You would have needed wine, and not had it; cod-liver oil, and not had it; grapes, and not had them; calves’ foot jelly, and had to do without. You would have been given thin gruel, and fried india-rubber, that playfully considered itself rump steak, much as you consider yourself a nobleman, and leaden dough, greasy bacon, and lukewarm bad tea. Your bed would have been lumpy, and made occasionally, and your sheets changed now and then, and your pillow-case assuming the adhesiveness to your cheek of postage stamps; and there would have been a draught like a mill-race pouring in through that gap—I know it—under the door. When you wanted to sleep by day, your mother would be scouring pans in the back kitchen underneath, and when so inclined at night, your father, on the other side of the partition, would be snoring like John Willett. As you grew weaker, and more unable to endure worry, in would have come the captain, to exhort and expound, and stir and whip up your weary soul into a caper of screaming terror. You would have longed for death as an escape from the smells and the smoke, and the crude blue, and the draught, and the knots in your mattress, and the Missionary Magazines, and the pigs in the yard, and the benzoline lamp.”