China tea he had asked
for, Yeovil would hardly have been surprised. However, the tea duly
arrived on the table, and the pale damsel scribbled a figure on a slip of
paper, put it silently by the side of the teapot, and drifted silently
away. Yeovil had seen the same sort of thing done on the musical-comedy
stage, and done rather differently.

"Can you tell me, sir, is the Imperial announcement out yet?" asked the
young clergyman, after a brief scrutiny of his neighbour.

"No, I have been waiting about for the last half-hour on the look-out for
it," said Yeovil; "the special editions ought to be out by now." Then he
added: "I have only just lately come from abroad. I know scarcely
anything of London as it is now. You may imagine that a good deal of it
is very strange to me. Your profession must take you a good deal among
all classes of people. I have seen something of what one may call the
upper, or, at any rate, the richer classes, since I came back; do tell me
something about the poorer classes of the community. How do they take
the new order of things?"

"Badly," said the young cleric, "badly, in more senses than one. They
are helpless and they are bitter--bitter in the useless kind of way that
produces no great resolutions. They look round for some one to blame for
what has happened; they blame the politicians, they blame the leisured
classes; in an indirect way I believe they blame the Church. Certainly,
the national disaster has not drawn them towards religion in any form.
One thing you may be sure of, they do not blame themselves. No true
Londoner ever admits that fault lies at his door. 'No, I never!' is an
exclamation that is on his lips from earliest childhood, whenever he is
charged with anything blameworthy or punishable. That is why school
discipline was ever a thing repugnant to the schoolboard child and its
parents; no schoolboard scholar ever deserved punishment. However
obvious the fault might seem to a disciplinarian, 'No, I never'
exonerated it as something that had not happened. Public schoolboys and
private schoolboys of the upper and middle class had their fling and took
their thrashings, when they were found out, as a piece of bad luck, but
'our Bert' and 'our Sid' were of those for whom there is no condemnation;
if they were punished it was for faults that 'no, they never' committed.
Naturally the grown-up generation of Berts and Sids, the voters and
householders, do not realise