The news was greeted with incredulity. "Tom soul-saving? Impossible! Tom the cynic, the irreligious, the despiser of dogma, the arbitrator of indifference—Incredible."
But Matcham knew. There could be no doubt. A man he knew in Brooks's had a brother, a parson in an East-End Settlement. The parson knew Tom well, said he was always down there, in the men's clubs and about the streets.
They looked at one another in dismay. Claribel laughed to see them. What was to be done? Tom must be saved, of course; but how? No plan could be evoked. "Well, the first thing we must do," said Mrs. Matcham, "is to get a plain statement from himself about it."
They sent Claribel as their ambassador, realising, suddenly, that "she had some sense," and that Tom liked her.
She told him, with a twinkle in her eye, what they wanted.
"They're all very much upset by what you're doing, Tom. They don't want to lose you, you see. They're fond of you. And they don't think it can be good for you being all the time with Bolsheviks and dirty foreigners. You'll only be taken in by them, they think, and robbed; and that they can't bear. Especially they think that now after the war everyone ought to stand together, shoulder to shoulder, you know, class by class. That's the way Henry Matcham puts it.
"Of course, they admire you very much, what you're doing—they think it very noble. But all this slumming seems to them ... what did Dollie call it?... Oh, yes, vieux jeu ... the sort of thing young men did in the nineties, centuries ago. Oxford House, and all that. It seems rather stupid to them to go back to it now, especially when the war's shown the danger of Bolshevism."
Tom laughed. "Why, Carrie," he said, "how well you know them!"
She laughed too. "Anyway," she said, "I know you better than they do."