“Mayn’t the poor wretches talk?” asked Mrs. Viveash, turning back to Bruin. “I never knew any one who had the lower classes on the brain as much as you have.”
“I loathe them,” said Bruin. “I hate every one poor, or ill, or old. Can’t abide them; they make me positively sick.”
“Quelle âme bien-née,” piped Mr. Mercaptan. “And how well and frankly you express what we all feel and lack the courage to say.”
Lypiatt gave vent to indignant laughter.
“I remember when I was a little boy,” Bruin went on, “my old grandfather used to tell me stories about his childhood. He told me that when he was about five or six, just before the passing of the Reform Bill of ’thirty-two, there was a song which all right-thinking people used to sing, with a chorus that went like this: ‘Rot the People, blast the People, damn the Lower Classes.’ I wish I knew the rest of the words and the tune. It must have been a good song.”
Coleman was enraptured with the song. He shouldered his walking-stick and began marching round and round the nearest lamp-post chanting the words to a stirring march tune. “Rot the People, blast the People....” He marked the rhythm with heavy stamps of his feet.
“Ah, if only they’d invent servants with internal combustion engines,” said Bruin, almost pathetically. “However well trained they are, they always betray their humanity occasionally. And that is really intolerable.”
“How tedious is a guilty conscience!” Gumbril murmured the quotation.
“But Mr. Shearwater,” said Myra, bringing back the conversation to more congenial themes, “hasn’t told us yet what he thinks of arms.”
“Nothing at all,” said Shearwater. “I’m occupied with the regulation of the blood at the moment.”