ith an odd cynical smile upon his face, but he did not
immediately reply. This famous hotel had seemed a cavern of all the
wonders when first he entered it, and he would not willingly abandon his
illusions. The beautifully dressed women, the rustling gowns, the
chiffon, the lace, the feathers, the diamonds--might he not have thought
that they stood for all that pomp and circumstance of life which the
East End denounced so vehemently and the West End as persistently
demanded? Of the inner lives of these people he knew absolutely nothing.
And, after all, he remembered, men and women are much the same whatever
the circumstance.

"I like to be in beautiful places," he confessed in his turn, "and this
place seems to me very beautiful. Does it really matter to us, Forrest,
what the people do or what they are so long as they don't ask us to be
the same? Jimmy Dale, a parson in Whitechapel, used to say that a man
was just what his conscience made him. I don't see how the fact of
living in or out of a hotel would matter anyway--unless you leave your
conscience in a cab. The rest is mostly talk, and untrue at that, they
say. You yourself know that you don't believe half of it."

"My dear man, what would life be if one were incredulous? How would the
newspaper proprietors buy bread and cheese, to say nothing of pate de
foie gras and ninety-two Pommery if the world desired the truth? This
crowd is mostly on the brink of a precipice, and a man or a woman goes
over every day. Then you have the law report and old Righteousness in a
white wig, who has not been found out, to pronounce a judgment. I'd
like to wager that not one in three of these people ever did an honest
day's work in a lifetime. One half is rank idle--the other half is
trying to live on the remainder. Work it out and pass me the wine--and
mind you don't get setting up any images for time to knock down--eh,
what?"

Alban would not wrangle with him, and for a little while he ate in
silence, watching the sparkling throng and listening to such scraps of
conversation as floated to him from merry tables. Down in Union Street
it had been the fashion to decry idleness and the crimes of the
rich--the orators having it that leisure was criminal and ease a heinous
sin. Alban had never believed in any such fallacy. "We are all born
lazy," he had said, "and few of us would work unless we had to. Vanity
is at the bottom of all that we do. If no one were vain, the world would
stand