At midnight he had gravitated to the embankment, and found a seat not overcrowded.
Here he fell in with a gentleman, derelict like himself, a free spoken individual, whose conversation wiled away an hour.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE BLIGHTED CITY
Said the person after a request for a match: “Warm night, but there’s a change in the weather coming on, or I’m greatly mistaken. I’ve lost nearly everything in the chops and changes of life, but there’s one thing I haven’t lost—my barometer—that’s to say my rheumatism. It tells me when rain is coming as sure as an aneroid. London is pretty full for the time of year, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” said Jones, “I reckon it is.”
They talked, the gentleman with the barometer passing from the weather to politics, from politics to high finance, from high finance to himself. He had been a solicitor.
“Disbarred, as you see, for nothing, but what a hundred men are doing at the present moment. There’s no justice in the world, except maybe in the Law Courts. I’m not one of those who think the Law is an ass, no, there’s a great deal of common sense in the Law of England. I’m not talking of the Incorporated Law Society that shut me out from a living, for a slip any man might make. I’m talking of the old Laws of England as administered by his Majesty’s Judges; study them, and you will be astonished at their straight common-sense and justice. I’m not holding any brief for lawyers—I’m frank, you see—the business of lawyers is to wriggle round and circumvent the truth, to muddy evidence, confuse witnesses and undo justice. I’m just talking of the laws.”