"Fashionable! I know the son of a Marquis, a Lord himself, who's a
Liberal, and a good one," Mr. Bullsom remarked, with a wink to Brooks.

"Well, my dears," Mrs. Bullsom said, making an effort to rise, and
failing at the first attempt, "shall we leave the gentlemen to talk
about it over their wine?

"Oh, you sit down again, mother," Selina directed.

"That sort of thing's quite old-fashioned, isn't it, Mr. Brooks? We're
going to stay with you. You can smoke. Ann, bring the cigars."

Mrs. Bullsom, who was looking forward to a nap in a quiet corner of
the drawing-room, obeyed with resignation written large on her
good-natured, somewhat flushed face. But Mr. Bullsom, who wanted to
revert to the subject which still fascinated him, grunted.

"Hang these new ideas," he said. "It's you they're after, Mr. Brooks.
As a rule, they're off before I can get near my cigar-box."

Selina affected a little consciousness, which she felt became her.

"Such foolishness, papa. You don't believe it, do you, Mr. Brooks?"

"Am I not to, then?" he asked, looking down upon her with a smile.
Whereupon Selina's consciousness became confusion.

"How stupid you are," she murmured. "You can believe just what you
like. What are you looking at over in the corner of the room?"

"Ghosts," he answered.

Yet very much as those images flitted at that moment through his brain,
so events were really shaping themselves in that bare clean-swept room
into which his eyes had for a moment strayed away. Mary Scott was
there, her long apron damp with soap-suds and her cheeks red with
exertion, for she had just come from bathing twelve youngsters, who,
not being used to the ordeal, had given trouble. There were other of
his helpers too, a dozen of them up to their eyes in work, and a long
string of applicants patiently waiting their turn. The right sort
too--the sort from underneath--pale-faced, hollow-eyed, weary, yet for a
moment stirred from their lethargy of suffering at the prospect of some
passing relief. There was a young woman, hollow-cheeked, thin herself
as a lath, eager for work or chance of work for her husband--that
morning out of hospital, still too delicate to face the night air and
the hot room. He knew shorthand, could keep books, typewrite, a little
slip about his character, but that was all over and done with. A bank
clerk with L90 a year, obliged to wear a silk hat, who marries a
penniless girl on his summer holiday. They must live,