ods. How little is all
our magnanimity--an accident! a phase! The very Saints of old had first
to flee the world. And Denton and his Elizabeth could not flee their
world, no longer were there open roads to unclaimed lands where men
might live freely--however hardly--and keep their souls in peace. The
city had swallowed up mankind.

For a time these two Labour Serfs were kept at their original
occupations, she at her brass stamping and Denton at his press; and then
came a move for him that brought with it fresh and still bitterer
experiences of life in the underways of the great city. He was
transferred to the care of a rather more elaborate press in the central
factory of the London Tile Trust.

In this new situation he had to work in a long vaulted room with a
number of other men, for the most part born Labour Serfs. He came to
this intercourse reluctantly. His upbringing had been refined, and,
until his ill fortune had brought him to that costume, he had never
spoken in his life, except by way of command or some immediate
necessity, to the white-faced wearers of the blue canvas. Now at last
came contact; he had to work beside them, share their tools, eat with
them. To both Elizabeth and himself this seemed a further degradation.

His taste would have seemed extreme to a man of the nineteenth century.
But slowly and inevitably in the intervening years a gulf had opened
between the wearers of the blue canvas and the classes above, a
difference not simply of circumstances and habits of life, but of habits
of thought--even of language. The underways had developed a dialect of
their own: above, too, had arisen a dialect, a code of thought, a
language of "culture," which aimed by a sedulous search after fresh
distinction to widen perpetually the space between itself and
"vulgarity." The bond of a common faith, moreover, no longer held the
race together. The last years of the nineteenth century were
distinguished by the rapid development among the prosperous idle of
esoteric perversions of the popular religion: glosses and
interpretations that reduced the broad teachings of the carpenter of
Nazareth to the exquisite narrowness of their lives. And, spite of their
inclination towards the ancient fashion of living, neither Elizabeth nor
Denton had been sufficiently original to escape the suggestion of their
surroundings. In matters of common behaviour they had followed the ways
of their class, and so when they fell at last t