ighed upon him
now heavily and constantly. The loss itself would take from him an
object on which affection--checked and thwarted elsewhere--was still
free to spend itself in ways peculiarly noble and tender; and as for
those other changes to which the first great change must lead--his
transference to the Upper House, and the extension for himself of all
the ceremonial side of life--he looked forward to them with an intense
and resentful repugnance, as to aggravations, perversely thrust on him
from without, of a great and necessary grief. Few men believed less
happily in democracy than Aldous Raeburn; on the other hand, few men
felt a more steady distaste for certain kinds of inequality.

He was to meet a young inspector at the corner of Little Queen Street,
and they were to visit together a series of small brush-drawing and
box-making workshops in the Drury Lane district, to which the attention
of the Department had lately been specially drawn. Aldous had no sooner
crossed Holborn than he saw his man waiting for him, a tall strip of a
fellow, with a dark bearded face, and a manner which shyness had made a
trifle morose. Aldous, however, knew him to be not only a capital
worker, but a man of parts, and had got much information and some ideas
out of him already. Mr. Peabody gave the under-secretary a slight
preoccupied smile in return for his friendly greeting, and the two
walked on together talking.

The inspector announced that he proposed to take his companion first of
all to a street behind Drury Lane, of which many of the houses were
already marked for demolition--a "black street," bearing a peculiarly
vile reputation in the neighbourhood. It contained on the whole the
worst of the small workshops which he desired to bring to Raeburn's
notice, besides a variety of other horrors, social and sanitary.

After ten minutes' walking they turned into the street. With its
condemned houses, many of them shored up and windowless, its narrow
roadway strewn with costers' refuse--it was largely inhabited by
costers frequenting Covent Garden Market--its filthy gutters and broken
pavements, it touched, indeed, a depth of sinister squalor beyond most
of its fellows. The air was heavy with odours which, in this July heat,
seemed to bear with them the inmost essences of things sickening and
decaying; and the children, squatting or playing amid the garbage of the
street, were further than most of their kind from any tolerable human