CHAPTER II. WORK OR PLAY?
“Get work, get work;
Be sure 'tis better than what you work to get.”
Two men were driving in a hansom cab westward through Cockspur Street. One, a large individual of a bovine placidity, wore the Queen's uniform, and carried himself with a solid dignity faintly suggestive of a lighthouse. The other, a narrower man, with a keen, fair face and eyes that had an habitual smile, wore another uniform—that of society. He was well dressed, and, what is rarer carried his fine clothes with such assurance that their fineness seemed not only natural but indispensable.
“Sic transit the glory of this world,” he was saying. At this moment three men on the pavement—the usual men on the pavement at such times—turned and looked into the cab.
“'Ere's White!” cried one of them. “White—dash his eyes! Brayvo! brayvo, White!”
And all three raised a shout which seemed to be taken up vaguely in various parts of Trafalgar Square, and finally died away in the distance.
“That is it,” said the young man in the frock-coat; “that is the glory of this world. Listen to it passing away. There is a policeman touching his helmet. Ah, what a thing it is to be Major White—to-day! To morrow—bonjour la gloire!”
Major White, who had dropped his single eye-glass a minute earlier, sat squarely looking out upon the world with a mild surprise. The eye from which the glass had fallen was even more surprised than the other. But this, it seemed, was a man upon whom the passing world made, as a rule, but a passing impression. His attitude towards it was one of dense tolerance. He was, in fact, one of those men who usually allow their neighbours to live in a fool's-paradise, based upon the assumption of a blindness or a stupidity or an indifference, which may or may not be justified by subsequent events.