utterly divorced from understanding of, or faith
in, all that shadowy life, as those "shadows" in their by-streets were
from knowledge or belief that gentlefolk really existed except in so far
as they had money from them.

Stephen and Cecilia, and their thousands, knew these "shadows" as "the
people," knew them as slums, as districts, as sweated industries,
of different sorts of workers, knew them in the capacity of persons
performing odd jobs for them; but as human beings possessing the same
faculties and passions with themselves, they did not, could not, know
them. The reason, the long reason, extending back through generations,
was so plain, so very simple, that it was never mentioned--in their
heart of hearts, where there was no room for cant, they knew it to be
just a little matter of the senses. They knew that, whatever they might
say, whatever money they might give, or time devote, their hearts could
never open, unless--unless they closed their ears, and eyes, and noses.
This little fact, more potent than all the teaching of philosophers,
than every Act of Parliament, and all the sermons ever preached, reigned
paramount, supreme. It divided class from class, man from his shadow--as
the Great Underlying Law had set dark apart from light.

On this little fact, too gross to mention, they and their kind had
in secret built and built, till it was not too much to say that laws,
worship, trade, and every art were based on it, if not in theory, then
in fact. For it must not be thought that those eyes were dull or that
nose plain--no, no, those eyes could put two and two together; that
nose, of myriad fancy, could imagine countless things unsmelled which
must lie behind a state of life not quite its own. It could create, as
from the scent of an old slipper dogs create their masters.

So Stephen and Cecilia sat, and their butler brought in the bird. It was
a nice one, nourished down in Surrey, and as he cut it into portions
the butler's soul turned sick within him--not because he wanted some
himself, or was a vegetarian, or for any sort of principle, but because
he was by natural gifts an engineer, and deadly tired of cutting up and
handing birds to other people and watching while they ate them. Without
a glimmer of expression on his face he put the portions down before the
persons who, having paid him to do so, could not tell his thoughts.

That same night, after working at a Report on the present Laws of
Bankruptcy,