I had been at work a month; had my present quarters at the White Hart Inn, within a stone’s throw of where we lay sprawled with our faces to the sun—the loveliest inn, by the way, on the Thames, and that was saying a lot—with hand-polished tables, sleeve and trouser-polished arm-chairs, Chippendale furniture, barmaids, pewter mugs, old and new ale, tough bread, tender mutton, tarts—gooseberry and otherwise; strawberries—two would fill a teacup—and roses! Millions of roses! “Well, you fellows just step up and look at ‘em.”
“And not a place to put your head,” said Mac.
“How do you know?”
“Been there,” replied Lonnegan. “The only decent rooms are reserved for a bloated American millionaire who arrives to-day—everything else chock-a-block except two bunks under the roof, full of spiders.”
Mac drew up one of his fat legs, stretched his arms, pushed his slouch hat from his forehead—he was still on his back drinking in the sunshine—and with a yawn cried:
“They ought to be exterminated.”
“The spiders?” grumbled Lonnegan.
“No, millionaires. They throw their money away like water; they crowd the hotels. Nothing good enough for them. Prices all doubled, everything slimed up by the trail of their dirty dollars. And the saddest thing in it all to me is that you generally find one or two able-bodied American citizens kotowing to them like wooden Chinese mandarins when the great men take the air.”
“Who, for instance?” I asked. No millionaires with any such outfit had thus far come my way.
“Lonnegan, for one,” answered Mac.