Boodles and Aubrey went to the Queen's Hotel for their goose dinner; a place where good English fare may still be seen and eaten. Boodles had witnessed the pleasure-fair only, the gay and noisy side of things, and though the debased faces of some of the booth proprietors had alarmed her at first, she had seen nothing actually nasty. Cruelty was not there, or at least it had been out of sight. She did not go upon the other side, where the rogues foregathered, and where beasts were bought and sold; where sheep were penned in a mass of filth, with their mouths open, tasting nothing but heat and dust; where ponies were driven from side to side, half mad with fright, while drovers with faces like a nightmare yelled and waved their hats at them, and brought their cudgels down like hammers upon their sweating flanks; where calves, with big patient eyes protruding with pain and terror, were driven through the crowd by a process of tail-twisting; where fowls were stuffed in crates and placed in the full heat of the sun; and stupid little pigs were kicked on their heads to make them sensible. Boodles saw nothing of that, and it was just as well, for it might have spoilt her day, and have reminded her that, for some cause unexplained, the dominant note of all things is cruelty; from the height of the unknown God, who gives His beings a short life and scourges them through it, to the depth of the invisible mite who rends a still smaller mite in pieces. Living creatures were placed in the world, it is said, to perform the duty of reproducing their species. It seems as reasonable to suggest that their duty is to stamp out some other species; for the instinct of destruction is at least as strong as the instinct of reproduction, making the world a cold place often for the tender-hearted. It was not a cold place for Boodles that day, because she was in a happy state of love and ignorance. She was not worrying herself about Nature, who vivisects most people under the base old plea of physiological research. She and Aubrey went up a sage-and-onion-scented street, into the similarly perfumed hotel, up a flight of stairs fragrant with stuffing, and into a long room, to find themselves in a temple of feasting, with incense to St. Goose streaming upward, and two score famished and rather ill-bred folk licking their lips ostentatiously and casting savage glances at the knives and forks.