vourably placed for seeing the whole length of the
interior. Accustomed to the restaurants of fashionable hotels,
auction-rooms, theatrical first-nights, the haunts of sport, clubs,
and courts of justice, he soon perceived, from the numerous samples
which he himself was able to identify, that all the London worlds were
fully represented in the multitude--the official world, the political,
the clerical, the legal, the municipal, the military, the artistic,
the literary, the dilettante, the financial, the sporting, and the
world whose sole object in life apparently is to be observed and
recorded at all gatherings to which admittance is gained by privilege
and influence alone.

There were in particular women the names and countenances and
family history of whom were familiar to hundreds of thousands of
illustrated-newspaper readers, even in the most distant counties, and
who never missed what was called a "function," whether "brilliant,"
"exclusive," or merely scandalous. At murder trials, at the sales of
art collections, at the birth of musical comedies, at boxing matches,
at historic debates, at receptions in honour of the renowned, at
luscious divorce cases, they were surely present, and the entire
Press surely noted that they were present. And if executions had
been public, they would in the same religious spirit have attended
executions, rousing their maids at milkmen's hours in order that they
might assume the right cunning frock to fit the occasion. And they
were here. And no one could divine why or how, or to what eternal end.

G.J. hated them, and he hated the solemn self-satisfaction that
brooded over the haughty faces of the throng. He hated himself for
having accepted a ticket from the friend in the War Office who was
now sitting next to him. And yet he was pleased, too. A disturbed
conscience could not defeat the instinct which bound him to the whole
fashionable and powerful assemblage. For ever afterwards, to his dying
hour, he could say--casually, modestly, as a matter of course, but he
could still say--that he had been there. The Lord Mayor and Sheriffs,
tradesmen glittering like Oriental potentates, passed slowly across
his field of vision. He thought with contempt of the City, living
ghoulish on the buried past, and obstinately and humanly refusing to
make a pile of its putrefying interests, set fire to it, and perish
thereon.

The music began. It was the Dead March in _Saul_. The long-rolling
drums s