‘For a Temperance Anarchist,’ Merton would have liked to reply, ‘judging by your colours’; but he repressed this retort, and mildly answered, ‘Perhaps it would be as much to the purpose to ask, for what do you take me?’
‘For the representative of Messrs. Gray & Graham, the specialists in matrimonial affairs,’ answered the client; and Merton said that he would be happy if Mr. Warren would enter into the details of his business.
‘I am the ex-Mayor of Bulcester,’ said Mr. Warren, ‘and, as I told you, a man of principle. My attachment to the Temperance cause’—and he fingered his blue ribbon—‘procured for me the honour of a defeat at the last general election, but endeared me to the consciences of the Nonconformist element in the constituency. Yet, sir, I am at this moment the most unpopular man in Bulcester; but I shall fight it out—I shall fight it to my latest breath.’
‘Is Bulcester, then, such an intemperate constituency? I had understood that the Nonconformist interest was strong there,’ said Merton.
‘So it is, sir, so it is; but the interest is now bound to the chariot wheels of the truckling Toryism of our time—to the sycophants who basely made vaccination permissive, and paltered with the Conscientious Objector. These badges, sir’—the client pointed to his own crimson decorations—‘proclaim that I have been vaccinated on both arms, as a testimony
to the immortal though, in Bulcester, maligned discovery of the great Jenner. Sir, I am hooted in the public streets of my native town, where Anti-vaccinationism is a frenzy. Mr. Rider Haggard, the author of Dr. Therne, has been burned in effigy for his thrilling and manly protest to which I owe my own conversion.’
‘Then the conversion is relatively recent?’ asked Merton.
‘It dates since my reading of that powerful argument, sir; that appeal to reason which overcame my prejudice, for I was a prominent A. V.’
‘Ave?’ asked Merton.
‘A. V., sir—Anti-Vaccinationist. A. C. D. A. too, and always,’ he added proudly; but Merton did not think it prudent to ask for further explanations.