us
people as well. Especially bus-women. They ride about, they tell me, on the
most fantastically labelled vehicles and are always seeing new suburbs swim
into their ken, and gazing--

'Out over London with a wild surmise,
Silent upon a seat of No. 10,'

or whatever the bally thing may be. But I never join their rash adventures.
I belong to a different _milieu_. I move in a sort of social underworld.
Not that I can deny, of course, that there is a certain amount of
overlapping."

"I overlapped twice to-day myself," I said, "and as the second one was
knitting a jumper--"

"And then there are the Tram-ites," he went on. "I don't understand their
world either. The tram, I am told, suddenly plunges with a loud roar like a
walrus under the streets of Holborn and emerges on the Embankment. The
hansom cabs were called the gondolas of London. The trams, I suppose, are
the submarines. But they are not of my life. I do not mingle with them."

"I mingled with a tram once," I said. "I clasped it warmly by the rail as
it was going by, but I missed the step with my foot. It spurned me rather
badly. But kindly explain what you're driving at."

"All these classes," said Charles, "have their own friendships, their own
jolts and jars, their own way of being bullied by conductors and thrown
into the mud and squeezed into cages and arranged upon straps. But they
have one great thing in common, distinct though they may be. They are all
passengers, all takers of tickets. There is going to be a Bus Union, a Tube
Union, and a Tram Union, and when necessary they will combine."

"Against what?"

"Against the motorists, first and foremost," said Charles. "The opulent
people who ride a-wallop to their offices in cars. Suppose that Ethelinda
Bellairs, who is a trifle absent-minded, has got the sack for typing a
letter like this: 'I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your communication
of the 25th ult., and ask you to note that a sudden sense of indefinable
yearning seized Hephzibah. She closed her eyes and slowly swayed towards
him. Awaiting the favour of an early reply, etc.'--what happens? There is
an immediate strike of the Bus Union until she is reinstated. If necessary
the two other branches of the Amalgamated Society of Passengers are called
out. No case of hardship will be too insignificant for the A.S.P. We shall
all carry a symbol in the shape of a secret season ticket. When the strike
occurs nobody will go to work in the morni