but the bright morning when she ran into the fog somewhere
near Surbiton, full of tales to tell of the house-party that now seemed
a happy dream--during this gloomy remainder Sally wondered what could
have happened that the other Major should not have turned up. The fog
would have been more than enough to account for any ordinary
non-appearance; hardly for this one.

For it turned out, as soon as it got full powers to assert itself, the
densest fog on record. The Londoner was in his element. He told the
dissatisfied outsider with pride of how at midday it had been
impossible to read large pica on Ludgate Hill; he didn't say why he
tried to do so. He retailed frightful stories--but always with a sense
of distinction--of folk crushed under hoofs and cart-wheels. If one
half were true, some main thoroughfares must have been paved with
flattened pedestrians. The satisfaction he derived from the huge
extra profits of the gas-companies made his hearer think he must be
a shareholder, until _pari passu_ reasoning proved him to have invested
in fog-signals. His legends of hooligans preying on the carcasses of
strangled earls undisturbed had a set-off in others of marauders who
had rushed into the arms of the police and thought them bosom friends;
while that of an ex-Prime Minister who walked round and round for
an hour, and then rang at a house to ask where he was, ended in
consolation, as the door was opened by his own footman, who told him
he wasn't at home. Exact estimates were current, most unreasonably, of
the loss to commerce; so much so that the other Londoner corrected him
positively with, "Nearer three-quarters of a million, they say," and
felt proud of his higher knowledge. But neither felt the least ashamed,
nor the least afraid of the hideous, inevitable future fog, when a
suffocated population shall find, as it surely will, that it is at the
bottom of a sea of unbreathable air, instead of one that merely makes
it choke its stomach up and kills an old invalid or two. On the
contrary, both regarded it as the will of a judicious Providence,
a developer of their own high moral qualities and a destroyer of their
germs.

Bronchitis and asthma are kittle-cattle to shoe behind, even where the
sweet Mediterranean air blows pure upon Rapallo and Nervi, but what
manner of cattle are they in a London fog? Can they be shoed at all?
As Mrs. Fenwick sits and waits in terror to hear the first inevitable
cough as the old man wake