ST. OLPHERTS. [With a polite smile.] Yours! Ah, to that small, unruly section to which I understand you particularly attach yourself. To the—
AGNES. [With changed manner, flashing eyes, harsh voice, and violent gestures.] The sufferers, the toilers; that great crowd of old and young—old and young stamped by excessive labour and privation all of one pattern—whose backs bend under burdens, whose bones ache and grow awry, whose skins, in youth and in age, are wrinkled and yellow; those from whom a fair share of the earth's space and of the light of day is withheld. [Looking down at him fiercely.] The half-starved who are bidden to stand with their feet in the kennel to watch gay processions in which you and your kind are borne high. Those who would strip the robes from a dummy aristocracy and cast the broken dolls into the limbo of a nation's discarded toys. Those who—mark me!—are already upon the highway, marching, marching; whose time is coming as surely as yours is going!
ST. OLPHERTS. [Clapping his hands gently.] Bravo! Bravo! Really a flash of the old fire. Admirable! [She walks away to the window with an impatient exclamation.] Your present affaire du coeur does not wholly absorb you, then, Mrs. Ebbsmith. Even now the murmurings of love have not entirely superseded the thunderous denunciations of—h'm—You once bore a nickname, my dear.
AGNES. [Turning sharply.] Ho! So you've heard that, have you?
ST. OLPHERTS. Oh, yes.
AGNES. Mad—Agnes? [He bows deprecatingly.] We appear to have studied each other's history pretty closely.
ST. OLPHERTS. Dear lady, this is not the first time the same roof has covered us.
AGNES. No?
ST. OLPHERTS. Five years ago, on a broiling night in July, I joined a party of men who made an excursion from a club-house in St James's Street to the unsavoury district of St. Luke's.
AGNES. Oh, yes.