tle lot make believe there won't be anything of the
sort after this Parliament! They're going to vanish at a few top notes
from Altiora Bailey! Remington!--it's foolery. It's prigs at play.
It's make-believe, make-believe! Your people there haven't got hold of
things, aren't beginning to get hold of things, don't know anything of
life at all, shirk life, avoid life, get in little bright clean rooms
and talk big over your bumpers of lemonade while the Night goes by
outside--untouched. Those Crampton fools slink by all this,"--he
waved at the woman again--"pretend it doesn't exist, or is going to be
banished root and branch by an Act to keep children in the wet outside
public-houses. Do you think they really care, Remington? I don't. It's
make-believe. What they want to do, what Lewis wants to do, what Mrs.
Bunting Harblow wants her husband to do, is to sit and feel very grave
and necessary and respected on the Government benches. They think of
putting their feet out like statesmen, and tilting shiny hats with
becoming brims down over their successful noses. Presentation portrait
to a club at fifty. That's their Reality. That's their scope. They
don't, it's manifest, WANT to think beyond that. The things there ARE,
Remington, they'll never face! the wonder and the depth of life,--lust,
and the night-sky,--pain."

"But the good intention," I pleaded, "the Good Will!"

"Sentimentality," said Britten. "No Good Will is anything but dishonesty
unless it frets and burns and hurts and destroys a man. That lot of
yours have nothing but a good will to think they have good will. Do you
think they lie awake of nights searching their hearts as we do? Lewis?
Crampton? Or those neat, admiring, satisfied little wives? See how they
shrank from the probe!"

"We all," I said, "shrink from the probe."

"God help us!" said Britten....

"We are but vermin at the best, Remington," he broke out, "and the
greatest saint only a worm that has lifted its head for a moment from
the dust. We are damned, we are meant to be damned, coral animalculae
building upward, upward in a sea of damnation. But of all the damned
things that ever were damned, your damned shirking, temperate,
sham-efficient, self-satisfied, respectable, make-believe,
Fabian-spirited Young Liberal is the utterly damnedest." He paused for
a moment, and resumed in an entirely different note: "Which is why I was
so surprised, Remington, to find YOU in this set!"

"You're just the