“Beautiful!” said Onslow. He might have been referring to his own play, or to Mr. Shelf’s improving sentiment.
“You see, Mr. Onslow, from my position, so many people look up to me that it is nothing short of my bounden duty to deprive myself of certain things, and be, so far as possible, a humble model for them to form themselves by. Long before a constituency sent me to Parliament, I devoted my best energies to Christianizing the lower classes, and I hope not without success. If appreciation is any criterion, I may say that I was elected president of no less than twelve improvement societies. It took me much time and thought to attend to them. Yet I wish I could have given more.”
“Yes—that pocket does pull; there’s a regular tram-line towards it. H’m, mighty good work of yours. But doesn’t it sour on you sometimes? Don’t you want a day off occasionally? A run down to Monte Carlo, for instance?”
“Monte Carlo! You horrify me, Mr. Onslow. You are my guest, and I cannot speak strongly; but this is a very poor jest of yours.”
“Well, perhaps you know best about that place. Monte Carlo is risky at the best of times for some folks, because you’re bound to meet crowds of people you know; and if they aren’t on the razzle-dazzle too, and pinned to decent silence through their own iniquities, some of them are apt to split when they get home again. But I don’t know why you should be horrified, seeing that we are entre quatre yeux here, and not on one of your pious example platforms. You know you’ve been in a far hotter shop than Monte Carlo.—See me pot that red? Ah, rouge perd—Barcelona, to wit. If you remember, you were staying at the Cuatro Naciones, and at nights you used to cross the Rhambla, and——”
“Mr. Onslow, how did you know all this?”
“Do you remember objecting to take a sheaf of obvious spurious notes, and there was a row, and somebody whipped out a knife, and somebody else floored the knife-man with a chair?”
“Yes—no.”
“After which you very sensibly bolted. Well, I had only just that moment come in, but I saw you were a fellow-islander, and that’s why I handled the chair. You don’t remember me, and I didn’t know your name, but I recognized you the moment your wife introduced us, because I never forget a face.”
“You’re mistaken. I never was in such a place in my life, sir. Think of the position I occupy. Why, the thing’s absurd!”