“I expect London is crammed full of Benskins and Beecrofts.”
“Maybe, but there are more of the other sort there too.”
“If I don’t reach London by the time I’m twenty-seven I shall throw up the sponge.”
“Why twenty-seven?” asked Serge, smiling.
“Oh! if a man hasn’t done something by the time he’s twenty-seven he never will.”
“I’m a good deal more than that. . .”
“But you’ve done everything. You’ve made yourself. You’re not really any older than I am, and everybody here is so horribly old.”
“Yes, they all come to a bad and perfectly respectable end.”
Haslam swung his fist in the air and shouted indignantly:
“Respectable! Respectable! Give me a list of any ten men living in respectable suburban villas and I warrant you there’ll be more dishonesty and cowardly misdoing in their lives than in ten of the so-called criminal classes. I don’t understand it. I do rotten things myself—who doesn’t?—but I can’t shut my eyes to them when they’re done. Take my brother. He’s a beastly idiot or an idiotic beast, always getting into scrapes and shuffling out of them. By the time he’s thirty he’ll still be doing the same things, but he’ll have learned how to prevent them coming to the surface. He’ll marry, settle down, enjoy a comfortable income, be a pillar of the Church and a smug, hard Pharisee like all the rest, with all his tracks carefully covered up and his conscience having a splendid time going over them.”